After developing the vocabularies of law and computer science, and the typology of legal technologies, we will investigate the types of normativity that evolve with the integration of data-driven and code-driven systems into the text-driven architecture of modern positive law, highlighting the need to scrutinize whatever these systems are claimed to offer and what they actually deliver.
The first two questions for each ‘legal tech’ that is integrated in the typology are:
- what is the intended purpose / claimed functionality of this technology?
- how is the claim as to the intended purpose/functionality substantiated/evidenced?
This will be the starting point for a process of building new theories of interpretation that should enable an informed understanding of the output of computational legal systems, based on the capability to probe, test and contest such output. This is part of the final years of the project.