Paolo Galdieri : 13 October 2025 09:27
As a criminal lawyer and professor of Criminal Computer Law, a student of the late Vittorio Frosini, a pioneer of legal informatics in Italy, I constantly reflect on the state of our education. This reflection clashes with the acceleration of history: Frosini’s 1968 work, Cybernetics, Law and Society , though avant-garde for its time, is today a benchmark for measuring how well the Italian legal system has kept pace with the “digital society” he anticipated.
My own professional trajectory reflects this evolution. When I published my first book, Teoria e Pratica nell’interpretazione del crime informatico (Theory and Practice in the Interpretation of Computer Crime) in 1997, the approach was inevitably more speculative. The text was predominantly theoretical and dogmatic, a necessary effort to catalog and understand cases that were just emerging in the courts. Practical experience, at that time, was still in its infancy. Today, with thirty years of legal and teaching experience, my latest work, Il Diritto criminale dell’informatica: legge, giudice e società (2021), presents a profoundly different approach. It is a text imbued with practical awareness, the fruit of countless encounters with digital evidence, technical expertise, and established case law. The transition from pure theory to an understanding of technological phenomena and dynamics was a long journey and, above all, a constant reminder of the need for ongoing dialogue between law and engineering.
Today, in the midst of the cybersecurity emergency, Frosini’s call to train “cyber-ready” lawyers is an imperative, not an academic option.
Looking at the current Italian education landscape, significant inconsistencies emerge. The sector’s offerings are currently bifurcated, with a significant gap between highly specialized and basic training.
On the one hand, we are pleased to note the excellence emerging in higher education. In recent years, we have witnessed a commendable growth in university Master’s degrees and advanced training courses in Cybersecurity Law, Digital Forensics, and Cybercrime. These initiatives are generally characterized by interdisciplinarity, an integrated approach that combines criminal law (IUS/17) with technical disciplines (ING-INF) and investigative sciences, recognizing that understanding the digital criminal phenomenon is impossible without knowledge of the underlying technology. They are constantly attentive to regulatory compliance, following European Regulations and Directives such as GDPR, NIS2, and the AI Act, which continually redefine the scope of legality and liability. Finally, they demonstrate a clear market orientation, training professionals highly sought after by companies, public administrations, and specialized agencies (ACN, Postal Police), capable of acting as Data Protection Officers, Compliance Officers, and legal advisors in cyber crisis scenarios. However, these specialized paths remain elite, often accessible only to motivated graduates with adequate financial resources.
The shadow of this scenario lies in the criticality of basic legal education. The system’s true weakness lies in the standard curricular framework for the Master’s Degree in Law. Even today, in many universities, Computer Criminal Law or related subjects are not included among the core and mandatory courses, often relegated to the role of an elective exam. This approach creates a profound cultural and technical gap, resulting in a vast number of future lawyers, magistrates, and notaries graduating without adequate knowledge of the illicit phenomena shaping contemporary society.
The problem is not only quantitative, but qualitative. When the subject is addressed, it is sometimes limited to an abstractly dogmatic treatment of the relevant provisions of the Criminal Code (such as Article 615-ter of the Criminal Code or Article 640-ter of the Criminal Code), failing to provide students with the tools to understand the technological dynamics of crimes (for example, the architecture of an advanced phishing attack, the logic of a blockchain, the impact of Artificial Intelligence systems), to manage digital evidence, a crucial and often most problematic element in cybercrime proceedings, or to interpret criminal law in light of technical data, an essential step for the effective application of criminal law. This shortcoming has a direct impact on the judicial and forensic system’s ability to address the growing complexity of cybercrime, whose transnational nature and rapidity require an immediate and technically sound legal response.
The intellectual legacy of Frosini, who called for the emergence of a “legal science,” requires us today to move beyond the idea that technology is an “external” or merely accessory element to the law. On the contrary, it has become its supporting structure and the main vehicle for attacking legal assets.
To bridge the gap, reform must involve the introduction of a mandatory technical-legal approach in law curricula. This is not about training programmers or engineers, but rather developing jurists with sufficient basic technological expertise to interpret the law, manage evidence, and advocate effectively. This means establishing Computer Criminal Law, and other technology-related law, as a core discipline for all legal practitioners and encouraging the integration of teaching modules taught in collaboration with technical experts, case study simulations, and forensic report analysis sessions.
The legacy of Frosini, and of other masters such as Ettore Giannantonio and Renato Borruso, is, ultimately, a professional warning: modern jurists can no longer afford to be functionally illiterate in the digital world. They must keep pace with the times, capable of understanding the technological phenomena and dynamics that generate risk and wrongdoing, to effectively protect legal assets in the digital age. Only through a radical renewal of university education, placing “legal science” at the center of legal knowledge, will our country be able to deploy professionals capable of addressing the challenges of the new global landscape and fully protecting its national interests. The cybersecurity emergency requires transforming Frosini’s utopia into teaching practice.
Paolo Galdieri