This post was submitted by myself and Pauline McBride as a letter to the Editor in response to Richard Susskind’s article, ‘I asked ChatGPT to write some laws – this is what happened’ (The Times, 4 April 2024) (non-paywall version of the article available here).
Since it wasn’t published, we’re reproducing it here. This represents our own views only.
My article ‘ChatGPT and the Future of Law’ has been published in the Journal of The Law Society of Scotland, co-written with (and led by) Pauline McBride.
I was amazed (and honoured) that my paper ‘Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code’ is the focus of this week’s episode of the influential Future of Coding podcast.
This response was written in December 2021 with Pauline McBride and submitted to the Scottish Government’s Consultation on legal services regulation reform.
Written submission from Dr. Pauline McBride1 and Dr. Laurence Diver.2
This submission is made in a personal capacity and not on behalf of any of the organisations with which we are affiliated.
We are pleased to have an opportunity to the make a written submission to the Scottish Government Consultation on Legal Services Regulation Reform in Scotland. Our submission is structured as follows: in Section 1 we highlight the importance of the independence of the legal profession for the rule of law; in Section 2 we express concerns about the assumptions and limitations of the consultation document and the Roberton report on which it is based; in Section 3 we flag concerns about funding for the Roberton and Market Regulator models; finally, in Section 4, we highlight the need for more careful consideration of the specific characteristics of legal tech and what these mean in terms of appropriate regulation.
LLB (Hons), DipLP, PhD; solicitor; post-doctoral researcher, Vrije Universiteit Brussel: Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law (cohubicol.com), member of the Technology Committee of the Law Society of Scotland. ↩
LLB (Hons), DipLP, PGDip, LLM, PhD; post-doctoral researcher, Vrije Universiteit Brussel: Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law (cohubicol.com). ↩
Written for the Edinburgh University Press blog (Dec 2021)
Digisprudence is about the technologies that govern our behaviour, and how they can be designed in ways that are compatible with democracy. We’ve probably all had that feeling of frustration when using our smart phone or a website, that we’re in some sense being controlled or manipulated in what we are able to do. That might seem unimportant, but technology is powerful: imagine a car that won’t go faster than 70mph, no matter how hard you accelerate (even to avoid an accident or to get someone to hospital). Or think about the convoluted process you have to go through to delete your Facebook account, especially if you want it to happen immediately (this could have significant implications in the case of doxxing, or other forms of online harassment).
(Originally posted on the COHUBICOL research blog.)
This post summarises computational legalism, a concept I developed in my doctoral thesis that is borne of the parallel between code’s ruleishness – its reliance on strict, binary logic instead of interpretable standards – and its conceptual equivalent in the legal realm, known as legalism (more specifically the strong variant of the latter).
(Originally posted on the COHUBICOL research blog.)
Legal normativity is an important theme for COHUBICOL, particularly how its nature might change when the medium that embodies it moves from text to code- and data-driven systems. Normativity is a useful concept in thinking about the role of law and of legal systems; it refers to the purposive force of (textual) legal instruments and rulings that, subject to their interpretation and potential contestation, require citizens to act (or not act) in certain ways.
