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SMART TECHNOLOGIES AND THE END(S) OF LAW: NOVEL ENTANGLEMENTS OF LAW AND TECHNOLOGY Mireille Hildebrandt Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015 296 pages, $135.00 ISBN-10: 1-84980-876-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-84980-876-7 (hardcover) ON LEGAL REPLICANTS
I. DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF LEGAL NORMATIVITY?
Don't be too quick to respond that electronic agents, cloud-linked smart appliances, and digitally tethered things have no designs on law's redundancy. Through probabilistic inference and the subtle displacement or diversion of intention, such entities, distributed across a host of material embodiments, actively construct a responsive environment capable not only of coercing behavior but also of reorganizing the field of possible human action in ways that render the clean division of legal and technological normativity problematic, or impossible. And insofar as law is one of the principal means through which selfhood and autonomy are established and safeguarded, the intensification of ambient nonhuman intelligence driving legal and technological normativity closer together presents cause for concern about just how twenty-first century subjects will come to understand themselves, with significant implications for the future of the law's sacred institutions-from crime, contract, and property to the underlying principles of human agency, equality, and dignity. The reason is deceptively simple, and it is to Mireille Hildebrandt's great credit to have thoughtfully formulated it as a key principle of legal theory: the law is not technologically neutral.
Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law is a profound invitation to reflect on the entanglements of law and technology as well as the increasingly foreseeable prospect of a world of autonomic governance. Hildebrandt, a leading voice in the discourse on intelligent computing, privacy rights, and what is called "techno-regulation"-broadly, the regulation of human behavior by means of technologies1-offers an expansive, transdisciplinary overview of key academic debates and of recent critical developments in the practices of private industry and legal regulation alike. While quite helpful to the reader, however, this aspect of the book is ultimately mere window dressing for its true ambition: the challenge of developing a rational, empirically grounded, theoretical framework for evaluating and intervening in the overlapping trajectories of legal and technological beings as they conflict, coordinate, and generally reshape the world.
Penned in part in a remote cottage on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, the book dramatizes the complex, uncertain relationship between...