Law Goes Virtual
The old is dying and the new cannot be born.
BIICL announces Law Goes Virtual, a new research initiative to address emerging challenges of the Law in the virtual world, and calls for contributions to an international conference.
Digital transformation and online communication have profoundly altered the nature of professional legal service delivery and the operation of justice administration institutions and processes. The market and social power of big tech is regularly challenging the authority of national and regional jurisdictions to enforce anti-competition regulation. Digital transformation has radically reset property rights claims. The distinctions between public and private law are no longer clear as mass data is shared at the commercial and municipal interface. Comparative law can no longer be limited to dualities of legal traditions but must recognize cosmopolitan and global legal realities. Bastions of rights and liberty such as international humanitarian law are being bypassed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the battlefield.
Where does this leave researching, practicing, operating and relying on law in a world of AI, big data, and frontier technology and digital universes?
It is no longer enough to recount that law as we know it can adequately address the dynamics of these challenges to market certainty, and social ordering. For those who believe that we only need tinker with legal classifications to address new realms of crypto currency, or to rely on narrow and outmoded enforcement regimes when we transit into the virtual, it is now necessary to back up such confidence with more than blind faith. So too it is incumbent on those who argue the time is right for the emergence of new law to ground this argument in a case for law in the virtual.
BIICL has an established reputation for investigating emerging trends in international and comparative law, practice and policy. With the establishment of its Law and Change initiative BIICL has given notice that it will push the international and comparative frontiers of research and development for law into the next dimension. That is the purpose and the mandate for Law Goes Virtual, a new BIICL's research initiative.
Law Goes Virtual will engage many of the central questions confronting a world edging away from time and space. For instance, if data is the 'new oil' and marketing with and through data is the future for economic growth and wealth creation then what role will law play in determining whether data can be owned and predictably transacted? If I want to purchase property in the Metaverse, and use digital currency to do this, am I buying real estate or nothing more than a pixilated image? If data is property, but it is limitless and almost impossible to contain, how will it be protected through law and offer property rights as we know them?
Moving away from issues on law, markets and money, many younger travellers into the virtual are seeking freedom of identity and community that may not be available to them in real space. How will this search for new socializing and new personality be better governed to allow for participation and inclusion? The virtual communities which they create deserve to be trusted and orderly - safe spaces in which to enjoy new potentials and possibilities for living in the virtual. Can (or should) law be a key player in ordering the metaverse without limiting its liberties or enclosing its new values and markets like it has in the world as we know it?
In answering these and other pressing questions for law in the virtual, it is important that we open legal thinking to the languages of technology and information economy. Additionally, law and lawyers need to be equipped to constructively engage with the information pathways, the technological sustainment, and the frontier imagining on which digital realms rely. It is no longer sufficient to isolate law in its current commercial and social comfort zones. There are no legal, commercial or social institutions presently in the virtual that recognizably resemble what law, markets and policy take for granted in real space. How will these emerge and grow and will law and lawyers play a part? Today almost everything that happens in the digital/virtual involves humans and machines retaining some location in real space. But the pace of change is rapid and relentless. Law has in no way kept pace with this digital revolution and therefore its claims for regulatory relevance are weakening by the day as legal practice, scholarship and action lose touch with technology and the cultures of dependency and convenience that digital transformation feeds.
For BIICL to step into its new dimension and to provide a vital focus for frontier thinking about better ordering for a range of digital spaces and virtual experiences the initial exercise will be to curate and conduct an international conference on Law Goes Virtual. This will be a meeting of minds from a wide field of backgrounds and experiences that contribute to and benefit from digital transformation and its good governance. It will provide an opportunity to add law into the enterprise of better constituting the virtual. The meeting will offer an array of formats, speaking to and hearing from crucial voices including but not limited to legal practitioners, digital marketers, info tech ecosystems, governance policymakers, virtual community leaders, and social planners. It will provide opportunities particularly to the young for whom digital life experiences will grow as they mature.
The current planning is to have three major streams for the conference, to incorporate and cover essential meta considerations out of which more particular work on law in virtual contexts will evolve.
- Law and governing the virtual
- Property and markets in the Metaverse
- Rights and freedoms in an orderly digital universe
If you would like to be associated with the planning and production of this event, please contact:
Prof. Mark Findlay, Distinguished Fellow, BIICL
Dr. Irene Pietropaoli, Senior Fellow in Business and Human Rights, BIICL
