Document Type
Article
Publication
Berkeley Technology Law Journal
Year
2022
Citation Information
Margot Kaminski, Technological 'Disruption' of the Law's Imagined Scene: Some Lessons from Lex Informatica, 36 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 883 (2022), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1570.
Abstract
Joel Reidenberg in his 1998 Article Lex Informatica observed that technology can be a distinct regulatory force in its own right and claimed that law would arise in response to human needs. Today, law and technology scholarship continues to ask: does technology ever disrupt the law? This Article articulates one particular kind of “legal disruption”: how technology (or really, the social use of technology) can alter the imagined setting around which policy conversations take place—what Jack Balkin and Reva Siegal call the “imagined regulatory scene.” Sociotechnical change can alter the imagined regulatory scene’s architecture, upsetting a policy balance and undermining a particular regulation or regime’s goals. That is, sociotechnical change sometimes disturbs the imagined paradigmatic scenario not by departing from it entirely but by constraining, enabling, or mediating actors’ behavior that we want the law to constrain or protect. This Article identifies and traces this now common move in recent law and technology literature, drawing on Reidenberg’s influential and prescient work.
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