Trust

Public power and private power are not alternatives or necessarily conflicting: the economy requires adaptable, multi-dimensional and fluid rules rather than rigid, albeit reassuring, schemas. What can be considered private power and what are the causes that determine its weight? By what means does public power use private power and defend it? To answer these questions is to consider the relationship between politics and administration, lobbying, authorship and credibility of administration, and the search for a renewed measure of trust.

Following an examination of the principles governing public contracts and their hierarchy as codified in Legislative Decree 36/2023, the author focuses on the relationship between the public administration's liability and the good faith principle, examining the legal implications of the former on the latter. Specifically, it is stated that by broadening the range of legal problems that can be resolved in connection with public procurement, Article 5 c. 2 of the new Code keeps the process of "civilising" administrative law going. This procedure, however, may hit a roadblock in the form of c. 3, which designates as "culpable" the reliance that was fostered in the face of a "easily detectable" illegitimacy.

In its European Strategy for Data, the Commission presents its ideas on how the EU can create a «single European data space». The plan is to make the EU a leader in a data-driven society. By creating a single market for data, it will allow it to flow freely within the EU and across sectors for the benefit of businesses, researchers, and public administrations. One central factor in the European data space is putting in place clear and trustworthy data governance mechanisms. Focusing on publicly held data, the administrative structures in the Open Data Directive, the Data Governance Act (DGA), and the first sectoral data space proposed, the European Health Data Space (EHDS), are analyzed. The question posed in the article is whether the administrative structure that has been developed in the EU for the last decades, the European composite administration, is well placed to fulfil the ideal of clear and trustworthy data governance.