A Critical Embracing of the Digital Lawyer

Abstract

This essay is a contribution to the Educating the Digital Lawyer book project and addresses methods by which the legal academy might critically embrace the digitalization of legal practice, and a necessarily concurrent set of modifications to standard forms of legal education. The analytical approach of the essay is derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and particularly emphasizes the way that interdisciplinary domain draws attention to the porousness of the borders between technoscientific domains and social domains — including that of law — and the various ways in which technical artifacts (i.e., communication and information technologies), in addition to their most ostensible functional qualities, also exhibit regulatory effects; that is, the various ways that technologies function quasi-legislatively.