Law and Digitalization: Some Academic Illusions and Practical Issues

The article analyzes two interrelated issues: the influence of digitalization upon the key phenomena that the legal theory deals with and the degree to which digitalization of actual processes reflects in the construction of the legislative provisions. The author examines the body of recent papers on these issues and the content of the Russian electoral and referendum legislation affected by the digitalization processes. He criticizes the unduly broad approach to understanding digitalization the Russian legal scholars tend to use and questions the applicability of the respective word to the most important legal phenomena. Above all, it comes necessary that the law can lend itself to digitization, while by no means it can be digitalized. Among the practical challenges the author emphasizes the need to rethink or redesign the structure of the usual legal relations exposed to the digital context. Vocabulary update and other superficial amendments to the existing legal provisions are quite an insufficient answer to this challenge. A careful and sophisticated revision of legislative construction is required in order to deal with the digitization issues, while currently the mentioned need often remains without due attention of the lawmakers.