Law and Digital Transformation

Abstract

The coexistence of digitization and law fuels their mutual influence and calls for scholarly inquiry into their mutual impacts and the effects thereof. Technization of society has contributed to society’s development, and the objectives and vectors of this process have been in many ways informed by public and other social institutions, including law. Like before, digitization at its current stage combines social and technological mechanisms of managing societal processes, ingrained into the wide socio-economic context and connected with the implementation of the nation’s strategic objectives. Similar phenomena and processes have a strong impact beyond Russia’s borders as well. All this poses challenges for law. The article is an attempt to analyze legal challenges of digitization applying the method of comprehensive, intersectional and systemic analysis, which breaks down the excessive compartmentalization of sector-specific legal sciences and takes into account the relationship between national and international law, as well as advances in other social sciences. The new digital technologies transform law’s functionality, and this, firstly, is reflected in the dynamically developing sector-specific legislation, and secondly, adds a distinctive dimension to the new laws and regulations of general character that create the basis for digitization. Digitization transforms the way subjects of law operate and the volumes of legal relations between them; generates new forms of administrative decision-making and of liability for non-implementationof these decisions; problematizes the subject area of the legal nature of technical (electronic) legal acts and the place they occupy in the legislative and regulatory framework; highlights the issue of the potential and limitations of automation of law. The study leads the researchers to conclude that in the age of digital transformation of economy, social sphere and public administration, law steadily continues to function as the regulator of socio-economic and other processes in society, ensuring both stability and the necessary transformational activities of individuals and public institutions.