I was delighted to be invited to write and present a paper at the Helsinki Legal Tech Lab’s workshop on Legal Design Patterns. The resulting papers will be published ad hoc in a special issue of Digital Society titled ‘Legal Design Patterns: New Tools for Analysis and Translations between Law and Technology’.

Adopting Christopher Alexander’s seminal idea of the pattern language, I take some first steps at articulating a set of conditions and practices necessary for the Rule of Law to exist and to operate. There’s even a visualisation!

I use this as a means to identify when certain necessary elements of the Rule of Law ‘language’ are missing – and to help in assessing technologies’ (in)capacity to afford those elements.

The event culminated in a stimulating workshop at the offices of Finland’s Chancellor of Justice, Tuomas Pöysti, who himself is a law professor and submitted a paper to the event.