Law as Meta-technology
From the different classes of hard cases as mentioned in the previous chapters, it does not follow that the aim of the law to govern the process of technological innovation, necessarily falls short in coping with its own purpose. Yet, such hard cases on t
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Law as Meta-technology
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Abstract From the different classes of hard cases as mentioned in the previous chapters, it does not follow that the aim of the law to govern the process of technological innovation, necessarily falls short in coping with its own purpose. Yet, such hard cases on the legal personhood of robots, clauses of immunity, artificial agency in contracts, and new types of responsibility for the behaviour of others, raise the further issue on whether and how the existence and content of the law can always be determined on the basis of its own sources. Before the hard cases of today’s laws of robots, the aim of this chapter is to determine which cases of robotics should be given priority and, moreover, whether one right answer is legally at hand, whether legal systems are open to alternative solutions, or political decisions need to be taken via international agreements. In light of the current debate on whether a certain type of drone design should be considered legal in the field of military robotics technology, for example, a reasonable compromise on the basis of legal expertise is at stake.Whereas both the UN General Assembly and its Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon have been quiescent up to the date of publication of this book, it is noteworthy that the condition of immunity for the use of robot soldiers today goes hand in hand with no-fault responsibility for the employment of both industrial and service robots in the civil sector.
U. Pagallo, The Laws of Robots: Crimes, Contracts, and Torts, Law, Governance and Technology Series 10, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6564-1_6, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Law as Meta-technology
We can extend to the legal field that which Aristotle suggests about the notion of “being” in Metaphysics (VII 1, 1028 A 10): “There are many ways in which the law is said Aristotle (1984).” Throughout the centuries, the law has been conceived of as a form or a set of institutions, a structure or a superstructure, a function or a procedure, a tool for social control or an instrument of social communication. By considering the sources of the law, jurists further distinguish between political planning and spontaneous orders, statutes and customs. A short survey of comparative law reminds us of the differences between the civil and common law traditions, between the supremacy of the Code in continental Europe and the judge-made law of the Anglo-Saxon legal systems. In addition, different schools, such as the classical and the modern natural law tradition, legal realism and the Law and economics perspective, old and new kinds of institutionalism as well as several variants of legal positivism, such as inclusive and exclusive positivism, imperativism and normativism, aim to unveil the essence of the law. Although this variety of standpoints can be confusing and even disturbing, an analogy with the mathematical phenomenon of incompleteness may help to explain the current state-o
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