A Kind Of Magic: Review of St. Petersburg International Legal Forum 9 3/4
The St. Petersburg International Legal Forum 9 ¾: Vaccination by Law brought together predominantly lawyers, although its agenda was devoted to issues with a much wider circle of stakeholders.
The Forum’s name produces strong association with a platform 9 3/4 from which Harry Potter started his journey to the Hogwarts. However, I simply do not get what do the Forum and Harry Potter have in common.
Anyway, here I post some thoughts on online sessions of the Forum that I attended.
Fight Stress
Many lawyers suffer from burnout syndrome. Its symptoms include, among others, emotional exhaustion, personal detachment, and devaluation of professional achievements. Unfortunately, films about breathtaking legal proceedings poorly represent this side of legal career.
I was frightened by the fact that 65 out of 3500 lawyers who participated in the research about professional well-being think of suicide. This is a big and scary number.
Lawyers are taught to work hard, but are not taught to relieve stress. In this respect, idealists, perfectionists, and overly-responsible people are particularly vulnerable.
Lawyers are taught that living hard is normal, but are not taught that they own their lives (not vice versa). Lawyers’ columns may collapse, lawyers’ spirit may be broken.
Furthermore, lawyers are taught high professional standards, but are not taught that this is just a job. First and foremost, we are human beings — imperfect in our dealings, perfect in our imperfections. Money can make world go round, but money do not exhaust the goals and values a lawyer may have in life.
Well, the problem is recognized. What’s next?
The speakers suggested to-
- upgrade yourself, be flexible, be mobile.
- stay interested — in both professional and personal lives.
- master relaxation techniques as diligently as you master laws, and
- change your life if you dislike the way it rolls out.
Invisible Borders
In the public discourse, many are driven by an irresistible desire to regulate IT by state laws. But, as the speakers fairly note, there are limits to the regulation by laws.
Our views on what to regulate depend on current state of technological infrastructure. For example, did anybody considered regulating the Internet before the Internet emerged or at least was theoretically described?
Also laws should pass absurdity test. Absurdity concerns not only the legal technique (how lawmakers write laws), but also the substance (what laws are about). For example, does it worth legally regulating how Pokemons are allocated by Pokémon GO?
Visible Borders
The speakers believe there is a methodological crisis, which — as of now — neither the law nor the system of public administration can cope with: we live in a world of sovereign states, but we feel absolutely frustrated when we face relations, whose subjects or technological bases are located in different states.
While legal sovereignty becomes an argument in politics, international law becomes a victim of politics.
What can we do about it? The thing people did before us and will definitely do after us — negotiate and seek a healthy compromise.
Limitless Paper
Faster response time, minimized risks of human errors, operational resilience — the benefits of electronic transactions are vast and profound. However, some speakers observe, paperless does not mean trouble free — at least from the legal perspective.
Despite of seeming digital hype, a considerable number of merchants are conservative — and still use paper to transact. Why so?
Charles Kerrigan from CMS London explains with an example of electronic signatures –
The system of electronic signatures is useful if it is used. People will use electronic signatures if they trust [the system of electronic signatures]. People will trust [that system] if they understand it. [For that purpose] parties to the transactions should understand the laws [applicable to electronic workflows in general and electronic signatures in particular] and be comfortable with them.
Understanding the legal context of electronic transactions requires multi-step analysis. It includes, for example, checking whether the electronic signatures are defined, legally recognized, and valid in each jurisdiction of a cross-border transaction.
Paperless World
Many countries have laws on electronic workflow. But international electronic document management is stalled.
The speakers state that the international electronic document management lacks the international infrastructure — uniform principles of identification and authentication, mutual recognition of certification authorities, strong evidence power of electronically produced documents, clear responsibility in the field of cybersecurity.
This is a poor state of affairs: no trusted infrastructure = no trusted market.
Bad Words
It became fashionable among lawyers to obtain linguistic expert opinions, the speakers mentioned. Alas, the story often ends with lawyers bringing to the court conflicting results of linguistic tests. It turned out that linguistics is not ballistics: linguistic tests are often a manifestation of extreme subjectivity.
The key of the problem lays in the absence of objective research methods and tools. It is a common practice among linguists to seek for others’ opinions that confirm their opinions. For example, some linguists believe that if something is written in the dictionary, it is an objective fact. (Of course, it is not true — dictionaries often misunderstand and ignore the nuances of a particular case.)
The situation becomes especially troublesome when the results of language tests form the basis of public accusations in high-profile “political” and other sensitive cases, where what is a bad word and what is a good word is a matter of (subjective) linguistic interpretation — and judicial decisions.
In all fairness, linguistics does not stand still: quantitative and statistical methods appear, new directions (like linguistic conflictology) emerge.
However, there is still a long way to go. The speakers call for introducing strict algorithmic procedures for conducting language tests and achieving the maximum objectivity of the procedure and results of language tests.
Good Words
There are many who criticize bad laws. And there are few who are able to write good laws.
However, as the speakers pointed out, the ability to create high-quality legal texts is becoming a criterion for the survival of lawyers as a professional community in the era of (coming) AI technologies.
AI promises to decrease costs of lawmaking, increase labor productivity, — and make many lawyers redundant.
Lost Translation
Transfer to machine-readable law is inevitable, the speakers agree. It is a matter not of question, but of time (and costs, and policy). The law goes hand in hand with technological advances, and, the speakers predict, we will see the machines that can write, apply, and enforce laws, sooner or later.
A light bulb is useless if there is no socket and no electricity. The same way machine-readable law is useless if there is no ecosystem for machine-readable law. As of today, the concept of such ecosystem and the manner of its development (format, initiators, regulators, etc.) remain opaque.
To what extent are we ready to trust machines in decision-making? So far, the speakers suppose, there are no prerequisites for transferring the will to make decisions to machines, especially without understanding how the algorithms work.
Humans must be able to read laws. Given that, the speakers predict parallel existence of human-readable and machine-readable laws (at least for a while). We need uniform standards for translating machine-readable law into human-readable law and vice versa. (The question remains who is competent to make, and assess the accuracy of, such translation.)
And one more thing: today the absence of taxonomy and ontology of laws hinder the full-scope development of machine-readable law. The machine-readable law will eventually need to be as flexible as the human-readable law: it should evolve as the social life evolves.
Disclaimer: This is my personal blog. This is neither a legal opinion nor a piece of legal advice. The opinions I express in this blog are mine, and do not reflect opinions of any third party, including employers. My blog is not an investment advice. I do not intend to malign or discriminate anyone. I reserve the right to rethink and amend the blog at any time, for any or no reason, without notice.
