The variety, pace, and power of technological innovations that have emerged in the 21st Century have been breathtaking. These technological developments, which include advances in networked information and communications, biotechnology, neurotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, and environmental engineering technology, have raised a number of vital and complex questions. Although these technologies have the potential to generate positive transformation and help
address 'grand societal challenges', the novelty associated with technological innovation has also been accompanied by anxieties about their risks and destabilizing effects. Is there a potential harm to
human health or the environment? What are the ethical implications? Do this innovations erode of antagonize values such as human dignity, privacy, democracy, or other norms underpinning existing bodies of law and regulation? These technological developments have therefore spawned a nascent but growing body of 'law and technology' scholarship, broadly concerned with exploring the legal, social and ethical dimensions of technological innovation.This handbook collates the
many and varied strands of this scholarship, focusing broadly across a range of new and emerging technology and a vast array of social and policy sectors, through which leading scholars in the field
interrogate the interfaces between law, emerging technology, and regulation. Structured in five parts, the handbook (I) establishes the collection of essays within existing scholarship concerned with law and technology as well as regulatory governance; (II) explores the relationship between technology development by focusing on core concepts and values which technological developments implicate; (III) studies the challenges for law in responding to the emergence of new technologies, examining
how legal norms, doctrine and institutions have been shaped, challenged and destabilized by technology, and even how technologies have been shaped by legal regimes; (IV) provides a critical exploration
of the implications of technological innovation, examining the ways in which technological innovation has generated challenges for regulators in the governance of technological development, and the implications of employing new technologies as an instrument of regulatory governance; (V) explores various interfaces between law, regulatory governance, and new technologies across a range of key social domains.
Author Biography:
Roger Brownsword holds professorial positions at King's College London and Bournemouth University, and he is Honorary Professor in Law at Sheffield University. Until his retirement in 2010, he was founding Director of TELOS, an inter-disciplinary research centre at King's College London that focuses on law, ethics, and technology. He has acted as an adviser to parliamentary committees dealing with stem cells, cloning, and hybrid embryos, he was a member of the
Nuffield Council on Bioethics from 2004 - 2010, he served on the Royal Society Brain Waves' Working Party on neuroscience and the law, and he was chair of the Ethics and Governance Council of UK Biobank
from 2011-2015. He has published some 20 books and more than 200 academic papers; he is on the editorial board of the Modern Law Review, the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences; and he is the founding general editor of Law, Innovation and Technology.
Eloise Scotford is a Professor of Environmental Law, University College London. She joined UCL in 2017 from The Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London, where she started as a Lecturer in 2010, after a previous appointment as Career Development Fellow in Environmental Law in the Faculty of Law and Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. Dr Scotford actively researches in the areas of climate change law and governance, waste regulation, air quality control, comparative
environmental law and sustainable development. Dr Scotford is Associate Member of Landmark Chambers, a visiting lecturer in environmental law at Bocconi University in Milan, and Analysis Editor for the
Journal of Environmental Law. She also represents the United Kingdom in the Avosetta Group of EU environmental law experts.
Karen Yeung is a Professor of Law at King's College London and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Melbourne Law School. From 1996 until 2006 she was a University Lecturer in Law at Oxford University Faculty of Law and a Tutorial Fellow in Law at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. She has established an international reputation in two fields: as an academic pioneer in helping to establish the intellectual coherence and value of regulation studies (or 'regulatory governance' studies) as a
field of scholarly inquiry and as a leading scholar concerned with critically examining the governance of, and governance through, new and emerging technologies. Her current research focuses on
critically evaluating the nature, legal, democratic and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, Big Data driven predictive decision-making and advances in neuroscientific techniques across a wide range of policy domains including commerce, healthcare, legal services and the enforcement of law.
