Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach

Technology is difficult to study, let alone regulate. While law is uniquely positioned to channel technology toward human flourishing, technology poses special challenges to law and governance, obscuring human will and responsibility, stalling regulatory action, and putting rights and values into constant defense. The consequences can be dire. The United States spent three decades without a plan for nuclear waste disposal and still lacks comprehensive privacy laws many years into the information revolution. Law and technology as a field, meanwhile, has yet to cohere.

In light of these challenges, Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach offers a defensible and consistent approach to the legal analysis of technology, one capable of navigating technologyâs capacity to confuse and confound. Ryan Calo puts forward a step-by-step methodology for thinking about and ultimately challenging technology to meet society’s demands. The book demonstrates that, no less than health law or law and economics, law and technology deserves a field of its own. To this end, it helps formalize legal analysis of physical and digital artifacts and systems, sowing the seeds for the concept of law and technology itself.

Ryan Calo is Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor of Law at the University of Washington’s School of Law, having worked at the intersection of law and technology for over a decade. Ryan is the co-founder of two interdisciplinary research institutions at the University focusing on technology policy and the study of misinformation, and chaired a university-wide, President and Provost task force on technology and society. He also co-founded the leading North American conference on robotics and artificial intelligence law and has testified before the United States Senate about technology four times.