The Transformation of the Characteristics of Law under the Influence of Digital Technologies

Abstract

Law is one of the principal regulators of social relations and plays an important role in ensuring stability and order in society. Changes occurring across various spheres of social relations inevitably affect law as a phenomenon of social life, as a concept, and in terms of its defining characteristics. At present, law is undergoing a substantial impact from digital technologies. Such technologies exert both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, they enhance the effectiveness of legal regulation, improve methods of handling legal information, transform forms of interaction among legal subjects, and create new instruments for carrying out various forms of legal activity. On the other hand, digital technologies affect the principles, essence, nature, and defining characteristics of law. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of digital technologies on such characteristics of law as general binding force, formal certainty, normativity, and its intellectual‑volitional nature. The study concludes that the uncontrolled development of digital technologies, without oversight by legal scholarship and society, may result in the loss of law's fundamental characteristics or in their substantial transformation.