The Future of Law and Mobility

Abstract

With the launch of the new Journal of Law and Mobility, the University of Michigan is recognizing the transformative impact of new transportation and mobility technologies, from cars, to trucks, to pedestrians, to drones. The coming transition towards intelligent, automated, and connected mobility systems will transform not only the way people and goods move about, but also the way human safety, privacy, and security are protected, cities are organized, machines and people are connected, and the public and private spheres are defined. Law will be at the center of these transformations, as it always is. There has already been a good deal of thinking about the ways that law must adapt to make connected and automated mobility feasible in areas like tort liability, insurance, federal preemption, and data privacy. But it is also not too early to begin pondering the many implications for law and regulation arising from the technology’s spillover effects as it begins to permeate society. For better or worse, connected and automated mobility will disrupt legal practices and concepts in a variety of ways additional to the obvious “regulation of the car.” Policing practices and Fourth Amendment law, now so heavily centered on routine automobile stops, will of necessity require reconsideration. Notions of ownership of physical property (i.e., an automobile) and data (i.e., accident records) will be challenged by the automated sharing economy. And the economic and regulatory structure of the transportation network will have to be reconsidered as mobility transitions from a largely individualistic model of drivers in their own cars pursuing their own ends within the confines of general rules of the road to a model in which shared and interconnected vehicles make collective decisions to optimize the system’s performance. In these and many other ways, the coming mobility revolution will challenge existing legal concepts and practices with implications far beyond the “cool new gadget of driverless cars.” Despite the great importance of the coming mobility revolution, the case for a field of study in “law and mobility” is not obvious. In this inaugural essay for the Journal of Law and Mobility, I shall endeavor briefly to make that case.