LEA 2002

As electronic agents enter the information environment and electronic marketplaces, they engage in activities that matter to the law: accessing systems and networks, retrieving and spreading information, mediating personal and business relations, buying and selling material and immaterial goods. Through those activities they trigger consequences for their users, owners and developers and for the parties they deal with, reaching into contract, tort, criminal responsibility, intellectual property and data protection. LEA was the forum for investigating the law of electronic agents in the light of the state of the art in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems — and, in the other direction, for asking how electronic agents might be customised to support lawyers. The first workshop was held at the Department of Engineering of the University of Bologna two days before AAMAS 2002, organised by CIRSFID (University of Bologna) and IDG-CNR (Florence) and sponsored by the European projects Alfebiite, Alive and Eclip. Its invited speakers were Jon Bing, Emily Weitzenboeck, Giovanni Pascuzzi and Abe Mamdani.