How Legitimate is Legal Metrology Today? The Case of Electronic Meters: Vacatio Legis

Today, legal metrology deals with methods and tools related to the technical and legal needs of the State and was born mainly to guarantee the public faith of citizens. It can be considered as a science of measures dealing with practical cases concerning the use of measuring instruments employed for legal purposes, in any field of science or its technical application. Computer technologies, which are massively used in electronic measurement instruments, are a key and relevant aspect for legal metrology, since the result of a measure is highly dependent on both the hardware and mainly, the software used to manage the physical quantities to be measured: from the determination of the physical quantity to be measured by the use of a transducer, to the display of the measurement result. The use of active or passive sensors/transducers used for measuring the size to be measured, inevitably involves different construction technologies for both the hardware and the related management software. The metrological verification of the hardware appears simple since they are physical components, and therefore easily controllable; instead, the software component of the measuring instruments appears critical in the legal metrological control of the same: in particular for those measuring instruments on which the remoting function of the measurement data is implemented, and for the problems related to the transmission of the measurement data to remote systems. The remote management of measuring instruments is extremely critical: it suffices to vary remotely a metrologically relevant size to invalidate the whole result of the measure. The total control of the relevant software by the State in order to guarantee the public faith, therefore, must be absolutely rigid and transparent also in order to give legal instruments to the bodies of verification and control of the measuring instrument. A fundamental aid to this problem is provided by the OIML and the supreme judges of the European High Court of Justice.