Jusletter IT

The last two decades have seen law emerge online. This development has engaged computer scientists and web designers in communicating law. Recently, serious work has begun on visualizing contract clauses, generating cooperation between designers, computer scientists, business people, lawyers and others. New insights arise from such cross disciplinary collaborations. Each discipline provides theoretical insights as to how legal design and communication might be approached. More profoundly each has the potential to recast relationships – what does it mean for the «power» of law makers to be exercised in the context of such paradigms? How do such insights enable us to reconsider the role of lawyers: the traditional custodians of legal rules? We examine these questions from a theoretical viewpoint, and reflect on our own cross-disciplinary collaboration in the creation of a proof-of-concept tool for automation of contract visualization.