Law as Information: New Foundations for Legal-Historical Research
Helsinki, August 2019
The summer of 2019 at the University of Helsinki marked the starting point of InfoLaw, a project that brought together my historical and philosophical streams of research. I had long felt too constrained working purely as a historian, and I needed broader conceptual perspectives — both to account for the results of my research and to communicate them beyond disciplinary boundaries. The project quickly found an international dimension. Lecture tours at the University of Gujarat (India) and the University of Macau (China) offered an early and valuable test, opening the thrust of the project to scholars working from other legal traditions.
Synopsis
The sweeping effects of information technology on law have attracted enormous attention. Proponents describe it as a “disruptive technology” driving radical, unprecedented change across the legal field. Yet this transformation has gone largely unexamined in academia, remaining confined to the world of legal practitioners. The result is a dramatic — and deepening — divide between law in action and law in books, more pronounced than at any previous moment.
What is at stake in this divide? Legal practice is being severed from its own points of reference — its conceptual and intellectual roots — and pushed into uncharted territory. This carries serious consequences.
A new conceptual framework is therefore urgently needed. The informational turn in law is not only producing a new environment; it is generating new conceptual problems that challenge traditional ways of thinking about law itself.
For the legal historian, this pattern is familiar. Every major phase of legal evolution has required a rethinking of its foundations. The nineteenth century opened with Savigny’s call to legislation and legal science (1814); the twentieth with Kantorowicz’s turn toward a judge-centred legal world (1906); the twenty-first with Patrick Glenn’s compelling theory of legal traditions (2002). Taking Glenn’s idea as its starting point — law as tradition — this project asks how a tradition can function as a carrier of normative information.
If successful, the project will offer a new foundation for legal history: a discipline currently suffering growing marginalisation in legal studies, in large part because it has failed to rethink both its subject matter and its methodological tools.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 753427