One of the most influential accounts on law and technology has been Lawrence Lessig's Code (1999). It is a remarkable text: conversational, passionate, and funny, yet communicating a forceful repudiation of 1990s Internet exceptionalism (the argument that the Internet was either technologically beyond state control, or ideologically should be beyond state interference) with a more sophisticated theoretical account of the law–technology interface. It was a manifesto for the future, a technically competent constitutionalist's account of how to do things with systems and rules. The language in Code was urgent – it was written within a ‘revolution’ – and its registry was the prophetic, full of hypotheticals and what-ifs. In a single bound, Lessig makes it obvious that the horizon for law and technology is the ‘future’.

About the same time that Lessig was combating excessive libertarian zeal in cyberspace, the politico-legal networks of the West were starting to react to the 1997 announcement of the existence of a physically unremarkable Scottish sheep. ‘Dolly’ – named after the American country singer-songwriter (a chauvinist joke based on the fact that Dolly was derived from a mammary cell) – has gone on to be a technological icon as the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. In the immediate aftermath of her announcement, Dolly circulated within Western politico-legal networks – old and Lessig's new media, legislators, health departments, law reform commissions, bioethics centres, and law schools – as a future that must be stopped. Over the early years of the 2000s, Dolly came to represent a family of less woolly anxieties and hopes concerning reproductive cloning, therapeutic cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. These projections called forth law within Western jurisdictions to secure preferable versions of a Dolly-induced future.

This future focus, seen in Lessig, within the cultural legal event of Dolly and within all the other ceaseless calls echoing around the West for law to ‘keep up’ with technology, is a fundamental realisation for the comprehension of technical legality. The exposure of ‘law’ to ‘technology’ is chronologically explosive. It hastens the temporal vector. Thinking and legislating lurches from the ‘what is’ to the speculative ‘what could be’.