Posts Tagged - digisprudence

(Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law, online-first 2020)

Abstract

Delay is a central element of law-as-we-know-it: the ability to interpret legal norms and contest their requirements is contingent on the temporal spaces that text affords citizens. As computational systems are further introduced into legal practice and application, these spaces are threatened with collapse, as the immediacy of ‘computational legalism’ dispenses with the natural ‘slowness’ of text.

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(Law, Innovation and Technology, forthcoming 2021)

Abstract

This article introduces digisprudence, a theory about the legitimacy of software that both conceptualises regulative code’s potential illegitimacies and suggests concrete ways to ameliorate them. First it develops the notion of computational legalism – code’s ruleishness, opacity, immediacy, immutability, pervasiveness, and private production – before sketching how it is that code regulates, according to design theory and the philosophy of technology. These ideas are synthesised into a framework of digisprudential affordances, which are translations of legitimacy requirements, derived from legal philosophy, into the conceptual language of design. The ex ante focus on code’s production is pivotal, in turn suggesting a guiding ‘constitutional’ role for design processes. The article includes a case study on blockchain applications and concludes by setting out some avenues for future work.

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(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).

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Presented at the conference on the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR), November 2020

Abstract

In a constitutional democracy, the operation of law relies on the multi-interpretability of language and the possibility of contesting meaning. These capabilities are assumed in the contemporary structures of rule creation, interpretation, adjudication, and enforcement. When new technologies are introduced into those structures, such as AI/machine learning or self-executing rules (e.g. smart contracts), new mediations necessarily enter the frame.

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(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.

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Abstract

Technology law scholars have recently started to consider the theories of affordance and technological mediation, imported from the fields of psychology, human-computer interaction (HCI), and science and technology studies (STS). These theories have been used both as a means of explaining how the law has developed, and more recently in attempts to cast the law per se as an affordance. This exploratory paper summarises the two theories, before considering these applications from a critical perspective, noting certain deficiencies with respect to potential normative application and definitional clarity, respectively.

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Presented at TRILcon, University of Winchester, April 2018. This paper was later published as Law as a User: Design, Affordance, and the Technological Mediation of Norms.

Abstract

Technology law scholars have recently begun to consider the design studies concept of affordance, bringing it into the legal fold both as a means to explain how the law has developed the way it has,[1] and more recently in attempts to cast the law per se as an affordance.[2]

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Presented at BILETA 2018, University of Aberdeen.

Abstract

The literature concerning the regulation of technology is rightly beginning to focus more on ex ante, or ‘by design’, enforcement. Despite almost two decades having passed since Lawrence Lessig’s Code was first published, the acceptance that ‘code’ (as opposed to law) has the power to regulate, and an appreciation of that power, is still developing, particularly since it requires a level of interdisciplinary openness to which the conservative legal world is occasionally hostile.

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