Regulating Technologies: Legal Futures, Regulatory Frames and Technological Fixes

Description

While it is a truism that emerging technologies present both opportunities for and challenges to their host communities, the legal community has only recently begun to consider their significance. On the one hand, emerging information, bio, nano, and neurotechnologies challenge policy-makers who aspire to put in place a regulatory environment that is legitimate, effective, and sustainable; on the other hand, these same technologies offer new opportunities as potentially powerful regulatory instruments. In this unique volume, a team of leading international scholars address many of the key difficulties surrounding the regulation of emerging technological targets as well as the implications of adopting technology as a regulatory tool. How should we rise to the challenge of regulating technologies? How are the regulatory lines to be drawn in the right places and how is the public to be properly engaged? How is precaution to be accommodated, and how can the law keep pace with technologies that develop ahead of the regulatory environment? How readily should we avail ourselves of the opportunity to use technology as a regulative strategy? How are we to understand these strategies and the challenges which they raise? To what extent do they give rise to similar policy problems accompanying more 'traditional' regulatory instruments or generate distinctive challenges? While the criminal justice system increasingly relies on technological assistance and the development of a 'surveillance society', is a regulatory regime that rules by technology compatible with rule of law values?

Roger Brownsword and Karen Yeung are both Professors of Law at King's College, London.

The book contains a great deal of interest to stimulate the reader, much that is beyond the scope of this review to touch on. The quality of writing throughout makes the book a valuable contribution to the ongoing debates about how we regulate technologies and how they regulate us. -- Ian Walden * Computer and Telecommunications Law Review Vol 16: 2010 * An invaluable resource to any, from the lawyer to the sociologist, philosopher and ethicist, who are interested and recognise the importance of engaging with the ethical, social and legal implications of new emerging technologies Regulating Technologies will ... continue to be referred to due to the spirit in which it has initiated and helped frame and inform discussion. -- Matt James * Biocentre Newsletter * Some of the most perplexing issues are unravelled and explored in this collection of essays...The range of topics covered is impressive What makes this book so refreshing is that it sidesteps well-rehearsed arguments for improving the scientific basis of policy-making. Regulating Technologies is not the final word on a topic as kaleidoscope as this, nor does it claim to be, but it is an initial and novel attempt at a systematic and more comprehensive analysis of regulation at the frontiers of modern technology. -- Elen Stokes * The Modern Law Review Volume 73, No. 4, Jul 2010 *