Regulation of new technology: Institutions and processes
Smart contracts and the digitalisation of the law
This project starts from the premise that the stream of new technologies and business models that we have faced over the last couple of years (drones, bitcoin, Uber, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles etc) will continue to accelerate. The project won’t try and solve the issues raised by any particular technology, but will ask whether there are any overarching lessons that can be learnt about the appropriate institutions and processes for accommodating such technologies.
The idea is to look at current work on smart contracts (that is, contracts that run as computer code) and consider whether this work has application to the way that legislation is drafted and accessed. For example, could formal programming languages be designed to represent legislation in a way that would facilitate automated testing, processing and reasoning?