FRIAS Colloquium - Frauke Lachenmann

Trust and Trustworthiness: The Legal Perspective

Trust is the fundament of any human interaction. As Niklas Luhmann said, “without trust we would not be able to get up in the morning.” Law has long endeavoured to embed the phenomenon of trust in a normative framework under the heading of good faith, bona fides, bonne foi or Treu und Glauben.

Yet legal studies are troubled by similar questions as other disciplines when it comes to trust. These include:

-What kind of behaviour of individuals/institutions/states is apt to invoke the trust of others, permitting them to claim certain consequences?

-Is “trustworthiness” mere situational reliability, or does it imply moral qualities?

-Does trustworthiness require complete transparency?

-Is the trust existing in imbalanced power relationships, such as parents-children or state-individual, something fundamentally different from the trust between equal (contractual) partners?

-Does trust generate trust?

This presentation will outline the legal debate concerning the good faith principle on the domestic and international level, highlighting the long-neglected parallels with other disciplines.