Text-Driven Jurisdiction in Cyberspace

Grounding computational ‘law’ in legal education and professional legal training

“…At the highest level of abstraction, they will not only be generic but also 'essentially contested concepts' (Gallie, 1956). This is not a drawback but key to the adaptive nature of natural language (Hildebrandt, 2020e). It means that these concepts cannot be defined without reducing and freezing their constitutive impact.…”

“…This is the case because all other relevant legal norms that apply will limit, extend or alter the scope and meaning of the norm, while the application of legal norms similarly requires an interpretation that may slightly reconfigure, extend, limit or even transform its meaning. Natural language allows for this, because it affords both the stabilisation and the adaptation of the meaning of the norm in the light of new circumstances (Hildebrandt, 2020e). This, in turn, marks the hazardous nature of attempts to articulate legal norms in computer code, as this would require a specification of each legal condition that is explicitly formulated in the written rule, but also each legal condition that follows from other legal norms in the same piece of legislation or in adjacent legislation within the same legal domain, plus relevant legal norms of constitutional and human rights law, including unwritten fundamental principles of law.…”