Reflexive Law and Reflections of Legal Technological Consultation

Digital technologies are constantly becoming a bigger part of our everyday life and are shaping our lives and how we live together. Legal advice often plays an important and perhaps still underestimated role when shaping these technologies.  The project will shed light on the question whether law can be made fruitful as a design resource.

The goal is to explore law as a co-productive force and resource for technological design, and to make the use of law and technology cooperative. Through two interventions, creative and original approaches that anchor legal, but also ethical and social aspects in technology development projects, will be tested. These interventions are intended as methods to expand the toolbox of legal technology development consulting. One intervention addresses the legally compliant design of technology, while the other intervention addresses innovation processes that serve to implement ethical, legal, and social goals. Both interventions are to be developed, tested, reflected upon and improved iteratively, i.e. an effective solution is to be approached step by step. In doing so, the project is in continuous dialogue with the professional public and the general public.

RechTech forms part of the Cluster “Integrated Research”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Initiated in 2020 and continuously expanded, the Cluster is divided into multiple Sub-clusters, each dedicated to a particular research topic or research mode. RechTech is funded as one out of three projects in Sub-cluster 2: “Collaborative Interventions”.