CLEMENTEA (Consumer Law, Mental Health & Attention Economy) is a research project which received funding under the OPUS 23 competition organized by the National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki), project no. 2022/45/B/HS5/01419. The Project is being realized at the Chair of Philosophy of Law and Legal Ethics, Faculty of Law and Administration, at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. The Project's team is led by dr. Przemysław Pałka

The scientific goal of the CLEMENTEA project is to formulate a theory explaining the consumer law's role in the emergence, governance, and the (potential) regulation of the attention economy. CLEMENTEA will contribute to legal scholarship by building upon and going beyond the frontier of research within two communities of discourse: law & technology and private law. Drawing lessons from other disciplines, including marketing and psychology, CLEMENTEA will produce four innovative research outcomes:

1. A theory of "mental harms" incorporating into legal scholarship the findings of marketing and psychology, exploring the inner workings of the attention economy and the specific negative impacts it presents to consumers' mental health (enriching legal scholarship with empirical data generated in other disciplines).
2. An account explaining how the normative commitments of consumer law unintendedly contributed to the emergence of mental harms in the attention economy, exposing the law's implicit assumptions about the ways in which consumers' minds function (advancing the law's critical self-understanding).
3. A novel legal ontology and conceptualization of various kinds of relations, subjects, objects, and harms, enabling legal scholars and policymakers to understand the intersection of law and the attention economy better (increasing the legal scholarship's explanatory power).
4. A regulatory playbook surveying the possible pathways for legal reform, accompanied by the normative evaluation of these possibilities under consequentialist, deontological, and eudemonic theories, useful for the academics, the policymakers, and the civil society (increasing the law's regulatory power).

The CLEMENTEA project will undertake these innovative research tasks in intellectual dialogue with world-class experts from the United States, Europe, and beyond. It will generate excellent academic publications influencing the global legal scholarship. Further, CLEMENTEA will equip the policymakers and the civil society with tools helpful in responding to two pressing socioeconomic problems which, as the project hypothesis posits, are linked: the digitalization of the socioeconomic life (Cohen, 2019) and the growing mental health crisis (Talevi et al., 2020).

Consequently, CLEMENTEA's outputs will be significant for both the scholarship and for society.

The Project's activities are organized around four specific research questions: