The Law Lab
When you have a second to lift your head from the day-to-day, moment-to-moment legal work on your desk, you might take a look at what some people are envisioning with respect to your future legal work. The Law Lab — “A Petri Dish for Legal Innovation” — (a not entirely… savoury image, perhaps) — is a joint venture of Harvard’s Berkman Institute and the Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship with the mission:
to investigate and harness the varied forces — evolutionary, social, psychological, neurological and economic — that shape the role of law and social norms as they enable cooperation, governance and entrepreneurial innovation…
Tall order, not to say grandiose. But the Lab’s three focuses help to ground their work and make it a bit more comprehensible than the full mission statement prose.
1. Cloud Law
One of the key points about cloud computing is that computing will eventually become like a utility, ubiquitous and easy to use. If one inserts the word “law” for “computing”, you can get a sense of what Cloud Law would be like — a kind of “virtualized” resource that could be available anywhere, to anyone, at any time.
This would be “a new service layer,” offering “principally, identity, authentication, dispute resolution, reputation, accreditation and governance services.”
Scholars such as Lessig, Clippinger, Susskind and Benkler have envisioned a future where code is law and where new forms of entrepreneurship can evolve. Combining the structuring possibilities of digital code with the worldwide reach of the social web and personal digital devices creates an astonishing opportunity for unleashing the power of private economic institutions into the digital age.
[O]ur objective is to distribute social and behavioral science research tasks that would have previously required the investment of immense amounts of time and money by trained experts. By shifting these modular tasks to a much wider pool of collaborators and participants, we will not only enhance efficiency, but will also be able to focus the efforts of highly skilled personnel on the most complex work. Consistent with our mission to build collaborative networks and open technologies at the Law Lab, we aim to make prototypes of the technologies and analytical techniques available for re-use and improvement by the “crowd.”
For what it’s worth, I’m glad that think tanks like this are devoting careful, structured thought to where we are or could be going with law, given the wild ride that IT is taking us on. I’d be even happier if the profession itself were committed at some level to an equally serious investigation and didn’t simply run panting after change, trying to cope or, worse, ignoring what’s not merely inevitable but already shopworn. What the profession doesn’t do will be done for it by others.
As well, I’d like to see a comparable effort at envisaging a future for law of the non-entrepreneurial sort. As a great oversimplification, there are two basic functions for law in my view, two reasons why the profession is given a monopoly, if you will. One, the rationale that the Berkman-Kauffman union celebrates, is that law is a useful tool for creating wealth. The other purpose for law is to operate as a restraint on and a make-weight against power, whether governmental or social. This is most obviously exemplified in our obligation to provide accused persons with representation. But this righting of the scales function is, or should be, far wider than that. And should be the subject of study in the light of IT.
A bathetic PS. Law Lab: please, PLEASE, turn off the immensely irritating slide show at the top of your web page.
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