Digitalization and Empirics: What’s in the Stars for Legal Scholarship and Legal Education?

If law is about governing behavior, then the digitalization of all avenues of life will deeply impact the law, legal profession, and ultimately legal scholarship and education. This is not only due to the fact that current law is challenged by new products and services or by powerful new non-state actors with most effective means to influence behavior on their hands; but more profoundly the way we think about law, the mechanisms it applies and the way public and private actors influence behavior will be deeply impacted by the mass individualization digitalization enables. Individualized contracts or election campaigns, social credit systems and automatization of legal services all have repercussions on the law itself and what we will mean by ‘law’ in the not-so-distant future. Many of those innovations are based on empirical approaches, and lawyers will need to be qualified to understand these, not only to be apt professionals but to play their role in upholding the rule of law.