Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted (Future Law: Challenges for Law, Technology and Culture) - Hardcover

Diver, Laurence E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1474485324 ISBN 13: 9781474485326

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2021

Synopsis

Whenever you use a smartphone, website, or IoT device, your behaviour is determined to a great extent by a designer. Their software code defines from the outset what is possible, with very little scope to interpret the meaning of those 'rules' or to contest them. How can this kind of control be acceptable in a democracy? If we expect legislators to respect values of legitimacy when they create the legal rules that govern our lives, shouldn't we expect the same from the designers whose code has a much more direct rule over us?In this book Laurence Diver combines insight from legal theory, philosophy of technology, and programming practice to develop a new theoretical and practical approach to the design of legitimate software. The book critically engages with the rule(s) of code, arguing that, like laws, these should exhibit certain formal characteristics if they are to be acceptable in a democracy. The resulting digisprudential affordances translate ideas of legitimacy from legal philosophy into the world of code design, to be realised through the 'constitutional' role played by programming languages, integrated development environments (IDEs), and agile development practice. The text interweaves theory and practice throughout, including many insights into real-world technologies, as well as case studies on blockchain applications and the Internet of Things.

About this title

About the Author

Laurence Diver is a postdoctoral researcher in COHUBICOL (Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law) as part of the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology and Society at the Free University of Brussels-VUB. Laurence has contributed to a number of journals including SCRIPTed (where he is also Technical Editor), International Review of Law, Computers and Technology and Artificial Intelligence and Law. He is also co-founder of the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law (CRCL).

From the Back Cover

Reboots the debate on 'code as law' to present a new cross disciplinary direction that sheds light on the fundamental issue of software legitimacy Whenever you use a smartphone, website, or IoT device, your behaviour is determined to a great extent by a designer. Their software code defines from the outset what is possible, with very little scope to interpret the meaning of those 'rules' or to contest them. How can this kind of control be acceptable in a democracy? If we expect legislators to respect values of legitimacy when they create the legal rules that govern our lives, shouldn't we expect the same from the designers whose code has a much more direct rule over us? In this book Laurence Diver combines insight from legal theory, philosophy of technology, and programming practice to develop a new theoretical and practical approach to the design of legitimate software. The book critically engages with the rule(s) of code, arguing that, like laws, these should exhibit certain formal characteristics if they are to be acceptable in a democracy. The resulting digisprudential affordances translate ideas of legitimacy from legal philosophy into the world of code design, to be realised through the 'constitutional' role played by programming languages, integrated development environments (IDEs), and agile development practice. The text interweaves theory and practice throughout, including many insights into real-world technologies, as well as case studies on blockchain applications and the Internet of Things. Laurence Diver is a postdoctoral researcher in COHUBICOL (Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law), a project in the Law, Science, Technology & Society research group (LSTS) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474485324
• ISBN 13: 9781474485326
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276