Law and technology in the twenty-first century

Several areas of technological development will create new issues, as well as opportunities, for the legal system in the next century. Most prominent among these are information technology, genetics, energy, materials, brain science, and the social sciences. In addition, environmentalism will be a broad sweep across all scientific and technological developments. The globalization of all economies will raise international legal concerns to unprecedented levels of importance. In the shorter term, information technology and the social sciences have particularly prominent capabilities to influence the efficiency and the effectiveness of the legal system. The main barrier to an improved more effective and socially more beneficial body of law and legal system is the system itself. An iron triangle of relationships among the courts, legislatures, and practicing lawyers drives strongly toward structured, built-in inefficiency and ineffectiveness because it is in the professional and unequivocal economic interest of the lawyers involved in all those functions to maintain an inefficient system. A dozen remedies are proposed which, if acted on, would move the law and the legal profession to new levels of a positive contribution to American and global society.