Book contents
- Legal Informatics
- Legal Informatics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Part I Introduction to Legal Informatics
- 1.1 Motivation and Rationale for this Book
- 1.2 Technology Issues in Legal Philosophy
- 1.3 The Origins and History of Legal Informatics
- Part II Legal Informatics
- Part III Use Cases in Legal Informatics
- Part IV Legal Informatics in the Industrial Context
1.2 - Technology Issues in Legal Philosophy
from Part I - Introduction to Legal Informatics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2021
- Legal Informatics
- Legal Informatics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Part I Introduction to Legal Informatics
- 1.1 Motivation and Rationale for this Book
- 1.2 Technology Issues in Legal Philosophy
- 1.3 The Origins and History of Legal Informatics
- Part II Legal Informatics
- Part III Use Cases in Legal Informatics
- Part IV Legal Informatics in the Industrial Context
Summary
The philosophy of law is the study of the nature of law: What is law? What are the criteria of a functioning legal system? What is the relationship between law and morality? A course on legal technology and legal informatics focuses on the technological implementation of a legal system. As we move away from static, printed documents toward virtual, distributed, integrated systems, software (“code”) plays an increasingly important role in the legal system. Obviously code has applications far beyond implementing law. Yet, as Lawrence Lessig points out in Code 2.0, non-law code also regulates behavior, often in a more fundamental way than laws do.1 As discussed in this chapter, code is architectural in nature and effectively limits behavior similarly to laws of physics. Only in science fiction do we entertain the notion of faster-than-light travel, perpetual motion, or evading gravitational forces. Similarly, we tend to accept the limitations of code that prevent us from, say, lending out our e-books, though such lending would certainly be legal. Even if we are aware of these limits and do not like them, most of us have no capacity to change them. As far as our behavior is concerned, code may as well be the law.2
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- Legal Informatics , pp. 5 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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