E-Law at the University of North Carolina

Where software enables conduct that disrupts existing allocations of legal rights and obligations, a pressing challenge for the law is to construct stable descriptive theories of software development and behavior to which prescriptive legal doctrines can attach.  To address this challenge, concepts in computer science and software engineering must be precisely articulated and applied.  Intuitions and analogies will not suffice.

The processing and communication of digital information are subject to technological limits.  Recent innovation and cultural change have brought those limits into a series of encounters with legal rules and institutions, creating important opportunities for, and challenges to, the public interest.  At the University of North Carolina School of Law, we are identifying and exploring those opportunities and challenges, using existing tools of legal scholarship as well as ongoing research at the frontiers of computer science.