76114 Just Tech

Description

Technology is of urgent significance to the legal profession and to legal thinkers. Lawyers are uniquely placed to not only apply new technology to legal problems, but to critically think through the implications of emerging technology to questions of social justice. Today’s lawyers need to pre-empt these questions through training in the jurisprudence of technology.

This subject provides students with a robust legal story about technological developments and the significance of justice to tech developments. Classic jurisprudential skills and values such as ethics and justice are vital to ensure that future and ongoing legal engagements with socio-technological developments are framed by legal normative constraints. To date, justice has been put in the background in discussions of technology, with “law” being synonymous with legal technique, rather than legal evaluation.

Rapid changes in technology are of urgent significance to law, and law and legal thinking are uniquely relevant to the future direction of technology. This subject foregrounds law’s roles in producing justice when thinking through technology: law’s roles in protecting rights, protecting people from harm, and in establishing frameworks of responsibility. This subject goes beyond the current terrain of commentary on law and technology, which focuses on the (technical) purposes of specific laws, to a more general question about the purpose of law in this domain. Justice is the central value of our enquiries.