We have two confirmed key note speakers who will be attending on Thursday 11th, speaking at the Victoria Gallery Museum.
Abstract - Looking Back at the Law of the Horse: Why Cyberlaw and the Rule of Law are Important.
In 1996 Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit argued against the notion of defining cyberlaw as a unique section of legal studies. He argued that “the best way to learn the law applicable to specialized endeavours is to study general rules. Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on 'The Law of the Horse' is doomed to be shallow and to miss unifying principles.” In the years that followed this Easterbrookian notion has been the subject of much discussion and critique, most famously by Lawrence Lessig who countered Easterbrook’s Equine example with his very own bovine one. The problem is that academic critiques of Cyberlaw risk not seeing the farm for the farm animals. That is, while we sit in Ivory Towers (the farm metaphors ran out at this point) regulators quietly go about their job of regulating online activity (and not worrying about whether they are regulating horses or cattle). Academics who undertake research into Cyberlaw find themselves increasingly painted as Eastbrookian equine lawyers or as narrow (and mostly reactive) specialists in areas of applied law, such as online privacy, online identity, online criminality or online property(note the online connection). It is time for Cyberlawyers to regain the initiative and to stand up and proudly say “I am a Cyberlawyer”. To do so we must embrace the wider, theoretical arguments – Why is Cyberlaw distinct and unique? What is the role of the Cyberlawyer? and Where next should the academic study of Cyberlaw focus?
In this presentation I will argue that the study of Cyberlaw has lost its way somewhat in the last five years. We have allowed the agenda to be set by lawmakers and by mainstream legal rhetoric. This has all occurred while lawmakers, law enforcers and actors on the Cyberlaw stage have failed to engage with some of the key principles of Cyberlaw laid down over sixteen years ago by David Johnson and David Post. No one asks whether an action is legitimate or “ought” to be. Instead the norm is for lawmakers to act and leave that for the philosophers and historians to discuss later. The reason for this, I argue, is that we do not have own jurisprudence – instead we borrow from regulatory theory and rights-based language. This presentation seeks to form the foundations of a Cyberlaw jurisprudence by asking some difficult normative questions: Can a rule of law exist online? If so who is the legitimate lawmaker? What values are enshrined by Cyberlaw?
Professor Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science and closely associated with the field of science and technology studies, he is the author of twenty books, most recently Humanity 2.0, Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0 and (with Veronika Lipinska) The Proactionary Imperative (all three with Palgrave Macmillan).
Abstract - The Historic Quest for a 'World-Brain': Learning from the past to Govern the Noosphere of Tomorrow.
Although cyberspace is normally seen as posing unique legal problems due to its distinctive configuration of social relations, important aspects of these problems were anticipated – and in many cases even welcomed -- by far-sighted philosophers and social thinkers in the past who were interested in radically transforming their own societies. These ‘futurists’ typically tried to leverage the emerging media of their day – be it printing, telegraphy, wireless radio or wireless computing – to suggest new forms of governance for the reconstructed agents of the ‘noösphere’. The most persistent image of this new space, since at least the eighteenth century, has been that of a ‘world-brain’. I shall survey this tradition, collecting lessons that are still worth learning today, while arguing that the advance of code-based thinking into the biological realm could bring us to a point when the ‘world-brain’ becomes literal.