The Legal Metaverse and Comparative Taxonomy: A Reappraisal

Abstract

Abstract The present Article revisits my “Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World’s Legal Systems”—published in this very Journal a quarter century ago—which acknowledged the ideological nature of the law versus politics distinction and posited taxonomy as a means for understanding law. The original article classified law into professional law, political law, and traditional law, and heralded the tentative and dynamic natures of such classification. The two purposes of the present Article are to (i) reflect on legal transformations that have since occurred as reactions to global geopolitical, technological, and economic changes, and (ii) interrogate whether epistemological assumptions that produced the Three Patterns of Law hypothesis still hold. The question the present Article poses is whether a fourth pattern of law is now necessary to capture the new technological state of affairs and the new geopolitical balances of power: in particular, should a rule of smart law be introduced? This Article surveys some of the relevant legal transformations capable of impacting the mapping of each legal pattern to a given geography. Because the Internet (like law, religion, tradition, or language) is an informative-normative system that has produced a new frontier of development, and because of its ubiquity, I have used it as a test for the current viability of the hypothesis. I conclude that it is too early to add a fourth pattern of law; but it is, perhaps, too late to avoid a pattern of no law taking over global hegemony by substituting algorithms for lawyers.