Computational Legalism and the Affordance of Delay in Law
(Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law, 2021)
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.