Review of the Monograph “Law of the Digital Environment” (Tikhon Podshivalov et al. (eds.), 2022)

Abstract

In the era of digitalization, a rapid development of technologies takes place in various spheres of human activity. The pace of introduction of these digital technologies is so high that a gap has emerged, and is constantly growing, between the capabilities of digitalization products and the legal regulation of their application and the consequences to which their erroneous or intended use may lead. The applied aspect of regulation of legal relations within the digital environment, caused by the need to operatively react to the rapidly developing digital technologies, is currently to a certain extent outrunning the theoretical one, entailing a number of legal collisions, as only fundamental scientific substantiation of introduction of certain legal norms may guarantee their consistency and legality. Most of the works in this sphere are, undoubtedly, fundamental, but they mainly refer to individual aspects of legal regulation or theoretical substantiation of the large-scale problem under consideration. In this regard, it is acutely necessary to systematize the current experience in substantiating various approaches to the legal regulation of public relations in the digital environment, which would comprise fundamental positions of researchers from different countries. This task was posed by the multi-national collective of the monograph “Law of the Digital Environment,” the first large-scale research synthesizing theoretical and practical studies in the sphere of legal substantiation and support of events, phenomena and processes taking place in the digital era. Such work can undoubtedly be called a discovery in the sphere of digital law and an “encyclopedia” of the legal field under study.