IoT Law

While this sounds wonderful or creepy, it also marks the point that lawyers must become more than tech comfortable. Product liability, personal injury, privacy, commercial, government, and other lawyers all have roles to play in the IoT story. When an Uber car hits another car, who will be responsible? Who does the personal injury lawyer file suit against? What are the standards? Was too little or too much information shared? Was there a breach of contract somewhere? What regulations were in place? Who gets the ticket?

These and many other questions all raise open legal issues. One group argues that we need a new area of law to address them, while another argues that they simply raise new questions that need to be addressed under existing law. The questions also raise issues that will challenge our global network of laws. Instead of laws being written somewhere and interpreted by humans given a set of facts, laws are embedded into the things in the form of hard-wired or constantly evolving algorithms. We have not established how these laws will work as they or their actions cross jurisdictions.

As autonomous cars roll out, we could be looking at a new era, much like what happened around the beginning of the 20th century when cars were replacing horses. Would there be a new law of cars or were the general laws, ones we had developed over centuries and applied to horses, sufficient?

Years ago, Frank H. Easterbrook, then and now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the United States, and Lawrence Lessig, then a professor at Stanford Law School and now Harvard Law School, debated what was called the ‘Law and…’ question.

Law schools had expanded their curricula over decades by adding what were called ‘Law and …’ courses (e.g., Law and Society). They combined the study of law with the study of some other field and, in Judge Easterbrook’s words, this lead to ‘multidisciplinary dilettantism’.

Read original article


Tags: