Dear readers
After last year’s anniversary, the IRIS now enters the third decade and looks to the future.
The 21st International Legal Informatics Symposium focuses on the prevailing currents of legal informatics: Data Protection and LegalTech. While the great axioms – project culture, communication and language, abstraction, application, transparency, cooperation, networks and communities – have dominated the discussions over the last few years, this year’s emphasis lies on the fundamental questions of the year 2018.
The digitization of government and society forges ahead and leads to perpetual (personal) data requirements. Growing clandestine surveillance and control are menacing without privacy-friendly solutions. With the new GDPR and the intended adoption of the E-Privacy-Regulation, the legal instruments are placed on new footings. The implementation still raises many questions and demands collaborative solutions and practice, particularly regarding privacy by design, data protection and social networks, data retention, the right to be forgotten etc.
The many helpful IT applications in the legal world – referred to as LegalTech – are placing the spotlight on the technical part of legal informatics. A lot has happened in AI and Law research during the last 30 years, but the results were largely ignored by legal practice. But now both the technological environment and the applications have progressed sufficiently to be used in day-to-day-business and to reduce costs. It is essential to scientifically monitor this «hype» to lower excessive expectations and to fully exploit the opportunities. LegalTech is not a mere technical phenomenon; it also raises questions regarding fundamental rights and legal theory.
As usual, the IRIS special edition comprises, alongside new scientific evidence, articles regarding practical problems and applications of legal informatics. Carrying forward the multimedia publication in cooperation with Editions Weblaw, some of the speeches held at IRIS will later be available as podcasts, too.
The special edition is composed of the following thematic groups:
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Subscribers can also find all the articles of Jusletter IT – the magazine for IT and Law – within the Weblaw App. The App can be downloaded for Android (via Google Play) and Apple (via App Store).
We hope that the proceedings of the 21st International Legal Informatics Symposium IRIS, in printed and electronic form, will find as much interest as the IRIS publications of previous years!
Vienna, Bern, Rovaniemi and Edinburgh, in February 2018
Erich Schweighofer, Franz Kummer, Ahti Saarenpää, Burkhard Schafer
PS: What is your point of view at IRIS? Take part in the great IRIS Photo Contest at iris.weblaw.ch and win one out of 5 prizes!
PPS: The Jusletter IT archive is being steadily expanded. The IRIS proceedings since the year 2000 are accessible in the online archive.