The Autonomy of Law and the Formation of Network Standards

Vesting, Thomas

doi:10.1017/s2071832200012761

“…Secondly, compliance with standards is often a condition to access specific or protected markets or to take part in public procurements. Thirdly, and most importantly, standardization enables more efficient coordination and cooperation, by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs, and allowing a high degree of technological and productive interoperability ( Howard-Grenville et al 2008;Gunningham et al 2004;Vesting 2004 ).…”

Section: Intertwinementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots, standards and the law: Rivalries between private standards and public policymaking for robot governance

Fosch‐Villaronga

¹

,

Golia

²

2019

Computer Law & Security Review

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This article explains the complex intertwinement between public and private regulators in the case of robot technology. Public policymaking ensures broad multi-stakeholder protected scope, but its abstractness often fails in intelligibility and applicability. Private standards, on the contrary, are more concrete and applicable, but most of the times they are voluntary and reflect industry interests. The 'better regulation' approach of the EU may increase the use of evidence to inform policy and lawmaking, and the involvement of different stakeholders. Current hard-lawmaking instruments do not appear to take advantage of the knowledge produced by standard-based regulations, virtually wasting their potential benefits. This fact affects the legal certainty with regards to a fast-paced changing environment like robotics. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of overlapping public/private regulatory initiatives that govern robot technologies in general, and in the concrete of healthcare robot technologies. We wonder until what extent robotics should be governed only by standards. We also reflect on how public policymaking could increase their technical understanding of robot technology to devise an applicable and comprehensive framework for this technology. In this respect, we propose different ways to integrate the technical know-how into policymaking (e.g., collecting the data/knowledge generated from the im-✩ This paper is the result of a joint effort of the two authors. However, Section III and the Proposal 1 in Section IV are more properly attributable to Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, while Section II and the Proposals 2 and 3 in Section IV are more properly attributable to Angelo Jr Golia. All the other parts are attributable to both authors. RR This paper has been produced by a member of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre, a collaboration between the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies University of London and the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The author is grateful to Microsoft for the generous financial support that has made this project possible. Responsibility for views expressed, however, remains with the author.

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“…Secondly, compliance with standards is often a condition to access specific or protected markets or to take part in public procurements. Thirdly, and most importantly, standardization enables more efficient coordination and cooperation, by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs, and allowing a high degree of technological and productive interoperability ( Howard-Grenville et al 2008;Gunningham et al 2004;Vesting 2004 ).…”

Section: Intertwinementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots, Standards and the Law: Rivalries between Private Standards and Public Policymaking for Robot Governance

Fosch‐Villaronga

¹

,

Golia

²

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explains the complex intertwinement between public and private regulators in the case of robot technology. Public policymaking ensures broad multi-stakeholder protected scope, but its abstractness often fails in intelligibility and applicability. Private standards, on the contrary, are more concrete and applicable, but most of the times they are voluntary and reflect industry interests. The 'better regulation' approach of the EU may increase the use of evidence to inform policy and lawmaking, and the involvement of different stakeholders. Current hard-lawmaking instruments do not appear to take advantage of the knowledge produced by standard-based regulations, virtually wasting their potential benefits. This fact affects the legal certainty with regards to a fast-paced changing environment like robotics. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of overlapping public/private regulatory initiatives that govern robot technologies in general, and in the concrete of healthcare robot technologies. We wonder until what extent robotics should be governed only by standards. We also reflect on how public policymaking could increase their technical understanding of robot technology to devise an applicable and comprehensive framework for this technology. In this respect, we propose different ways to integrate the technical know-how into policymaking (e.g., collecting the data/knowledge generated from the im-✩ This paper is the result of a joint effort of the two authors. However, Section III and the Proposal 1 in Section IV are more properly attributable to Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, while Section II and the Proposals 2 and 3 in Section IV are more properly attributable to Angelo Jr Golia. All the other parts are attributable to both authors. RR This paper has been produced by a member of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre, a collaboration between the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies University of London and the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The author is grateful to Microsoft for the generous financial support that has made this project possible. Responsibility for views expressed, however, remains with the author.

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The transnational dimension of constitutional rights: Framing and taming ‘private’ governance beyond the state

Viellechner

¹

2019

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Abstract:International law sometimes fails to regulate cross-border affairs due to a lack of consent or pace among the states. As a consequence, transnational governance arrangements, which are established by contract mainly among non-state actors, step in to fill the gap. The arrangement that allocates domains on the Internet offers the most sophisticated example to date. The present article argues that a new approach to the horizontal effect of constitutional rights may both account for the emergence of such arrangements and offer a solution to the problem of their legitimacy. According to this understanding, constitutional rights at the same time enable and restrict transnational regulation. In this way, they guarantee a comprehensive protection of freedom under conditions of globalisation. As long as transnational governance arrangements are not able to generate constitutional rights of their own, however, the national legal orders must complement them. Hence, the legitimacy of law in world society may only be ensured through a dialectical process of internal and external constitutionalisation, resulting from the interaction of its various constituents.

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The Autonomy of Law and the Formation of Network Standards

Cited by 4 publications

References 12 publications

Robots, standards and the law: Rivalries between private standards and public policymaking for robot governance

Robots, standards and the law: Rivalries between private standards and public policymaking for robot governance

Robots, Standards and the Law: Rivalries between Private Standards and Public Policymaking for Robot Governance

The transnational dimension of constitutional rights: Framing and taming ‘private’ governance beyond the state

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