For any state governed by the rule of law it is essential that laws are codified and accessible. This conference looked at the issues involved in the dissemination of legal information.

From its very beginning, legal informatics was mostly limited to the study of legal databases, but very early on, the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG) started being involved with the specific topic of the Jurix conference, namely knowledge-based systems. This book includes programmatic papers with precise accounts of applications and prototypes. In many domains the focus has changed. For instance, research in retrieval has moved from classical Boolean systems into the management of documents in the Web. It addresses in particular standards and methods for embedding machine readable information into such documents and search methods that deal with heterogeneous information. Similarly, with regard to legal concepts, the focus has moved from thesauri to ontologies or to techniques for the automatic extraction of concepts from natural language texts. In the domain of legal reasoning merely deductive inferences have been expanded with models of legal argumentation, dialogue and mediation. The conference Logica, informatica e diritto 1981 and Jurix 2008 share the connection between theoretical models and the development of applications and prototypes. However, while in 1981 one could mostly see a juxtaposition of papers in legal theory and papers in computer applications, in 2008 we can see how discussions of issues in legal theory are embedded within contributions to legal informatics. This shows how research in legal informatics is increasingly becoming an autonomous domain of scientific inquiry by creatively incorporating and developing knowledge and methods from the two disciplines from which it originates (legal theory and computer science), while preserving links with them.

The present volume presents a part of the results of a research project launched by the European Science Foundation (ESF) in 1977. Tribute should be paid to the late Professor Aleck Chloros, Judge in the Court of the European Community, whose belief in the European ideal and enthusiasm for European cooperation and the comparative study of legal problems made him an elo quent advocate of a large-scale ESF venture into the field of com parative law. Judge Chloros had envisaged the creation of a per manent, sizable and well-equipped European institute for compa rative legal studies. The successive working parties convoked by the Executive Council of the ESF, which I had the honour of chairing from the beginning, came to the conclusion that this am bitious vision could not be realized immediately; the financial sit uation of the member organizations of the ESF also deteriorated, making a cautious approach a necessary virtue. The solution ulti mately adopted by the last of the working parties - the Ad Hoc Committee for Comparative Law -and submitted to the General Assembly of the ESF in 1979 called for the launching of four pi lot projects. In November 1980, the Assembly approved detailed plans for two of these projects. The first of these - dealing with medical responsibility - has already been presented in an impres sive volume (E. Deutsch and H. -L. Schreiber, editors, Medical Responsibility in Western Europe.

This is the first volume about the Italian philosophy of technology written in English and including novel and translated contributions. The volume presents original research on emerging topics in the field, as well as an overview of the most distinguished Italian approaches to the philosophy of technology. While offering both historical and political perspectives and the contributions of the philosophy of law, philosophy of science, and aesthetics, Italian Philosophy of Technology promotes a novel view on the intersection between continental and analytic traditions in the philosophy of technology.