Following my year as the Foresight Institute‘s 2020 Fellow in Legal Engineering for the Biosphere, I’m honoured and delighted to be kicking off 2021 teaching a course with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law, as part of their J-Term Social Justice Curriculum.
The full course title is: LAW546I: Legal Engineering for the Biosphere: Climate Policy, Extitutions, and Data Governance
Here’s the course description. I’ll be uploading the curriculum after the course completes. Please do get in touch if you’d like further information or would be interested in hosting or teaching this course.
Legal engineering is the use of legal and scientific principles to design and develop systems, structures and patterns for social, political, and economic ordering dynamics (laws, markets, norms, and architectures). It applies the theoretical frameworks and approaches of computational law towards the development of systems, such as blockchains and distributed ledger technologies, which offer the capacity to embed rules and other legal mechanisms. This course will offer an overview of this evolving academic and practical field in the context of current ongoing developments in systems for collective sensemaking, action, and feedback loops to protect the planet and our bio-regional, ecological health; systems that can coordinate at a global and local level, and every level in-between.
In the context of coordinating action around climate change and biodiversity loss, critical weaknesses in the current arrangements for nurturing and sustaining the global commons or global public goods, including jurisdictional, participation, and incentive gaps, can be addressed through legal engineering approaches. At a policy-level, novel data governance frameworks are being considered that allow for monitoring, accountability, and enforcement around commitments, with participation at an international and nation-state level, from both public, civil-society, and private sector institutions. In more general contexts, in an age of regulatory initiatives such as GDPR and CCPA, legal academics and practitioners will be increasingly sought out for advice on how ethical and lawful approaches to data governance, informed by legal engineering, can support and sustain compliance and stakeholder value generation across the full stack of business and civic challenges and opportunities.
Lastly, the course will offer an introduction to extitutional theory: While the institutional lens focuses on the roles and rules that shape and influence social interactions, the extitutional lens focuses on individuals and the relationships amongst them. Specifically, the extitutional lens focuses on the ways in which participation and mutual recognition pull people into alignment through local interactions. These local interactions constitute the basis for a distinct set of ordering dynamics which are the focus of extitutional theory. Allowing for the extitutional lens in legal engineering can help ensure that the systems designed by lawyers, technologists, and policy-makers of the future take into account the means by which patterns of social interaction, including customs, practices, and social norms, organically emerge as the driving gravitational forces for social behavior. The specific emphasis, in this course, will be on ecological and environmental issues, but this approach extends to any domain of potential collective action where complex, emergent, or decentralized dynamics are important.