Justice / Publication
March 27, 2025

The Rule of Tech? Submitting Legislation to Digital Constraints

© Image: Unsplash/Goost Eight

While ‘by design’ approaches are increasingly advocated to ensure technology being compliant with legislation, the opposite challenge of adopting legislation that is compliant with digital demands, is also gaining ground. Several jurisdictions are experimenting with some form of ‘digital-ready’ legislation, which aims at ensuring a smooth implementation of legislation through digital systems, but which also transforms the legislative process itself.

This chapter explores and compares several instances of digital-ready legislation and assesses the consequences thereof for the technocracy-democracy divide and the virtues commonly associated with the legislative process. It concludes that legislation is increasingly subject to the ‘rule of tech’ next to the ‘rule of law’, while the virtues traditionally associated with the legislative process have not become irrelevant.

To continue reading please visit: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-84748-6_11

This book chapter was published in Public Governance and Emerging Technologies on 27 March 2025.

Kutscher, S., Wolswinkel, J. (2025). The Rule of Tech? Submitting Legislation to Digital Constraints. In: Goossens, J., Keymolen, E., Stanojević, A. (eds) Public Governance and Emerging Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-84748-6_11

Keywords: Digital ethics, Ethics of technology, Legal aspects of computing

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