Beyond Traditional Scientific Output

The Typology, the Journal and the CRCL22 and 23 Conferences are decidedly breakthroughs in terms of legal innovation, both on a theoretical and a practical level. Though the Conferences were foreseen in the proposal, the Typology and the Journal were not planned.

All three have been discussed extensively under Goals and Objectives and Novel Methodologies: the Cross-Disciplinary Approach. It makes no sense to repeat the same argument here, but the novelty and breakthroughs can be summarised as follows:

  1. They all show rather than merely tell what a cross-disciplinary approach entails
  2. They create middle ground for CS and LAW to meet, engage and learn, without suggesting that lawyers should become computer scientists or vice versa
  3. They generate and feed on genuine knowledge from, about and concerning the other discipline, promoting a better understanding of the methodological integrity of the other discipline, resisting the one colonising the other
  4. They enable a rethinking of legal method in light of the move from a text-driven to data- and code-driven information and communication infrastructure, forefronting the need for testability, contestability and the foreseeability of adverse impact on legal protection
  5. They offer a method and a platform for lawyers and developers to better grasp both the limits and the possible contributions of specific legal technologies
  6. They require that lawyers neither reject nor embrace legal technologies, instead learning to question, investigate and better understand which applications offer what real-world functionality
  7. They are built on and designed to induce mutual respect, scientific and professional curiosity between legal scholarship and computer science, and between legal practitioners and tech developers in the realm of computational ‘law’