Metamorphoses of Global Law: On the Interaction of Law, Time, and Technology

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between law, time, and new technologies to explain the emergence and transformation of global law, with a special focus on platform economy. It describes the ‘metamorphoses of global law’ on the basis of an experimental understanding of legal theory that looks beyond the systematisation of dogmatic categories, the reproduction of prefabricated theories. It offers a novel and sound theoretical approach to the formation of society within a highly digitalised and platform-oriented world, conjugating the work of several relevant authors, such as Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner, Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Lawrence Lessing, among others.

The book answers the myriad questions that the platform economy poses for law, shedding light on the possibility of a hybrid regulation, i.e., the mixture of political-constitutional external regulation and a self-regulation by the digital code, in an attempt to overcome simplistic notions of platform governance. It provides a comprehensive exploratory analysis on the phenomena of digitalisation, platformisation, big data, algorithms, and their relevance to law in global society.