Opening the Black Box of Algorithmic Law

The development of new technologies and machine learning techniques are accelerating societal and economic transformations in our society. These transformations are compelling law to a technological update. For instance, terms such as regtech, suptech, regulatory big data and algorithmic supervision are making their way into financial regulation. This paper attempts to show that new instruments of regulation supported by big data analytics and algorithmic enforcement belong to a broader transformation of law as a social institution: the emergence of a conception of law that is scientific, mathematical, algorithmic, risk and technology driven (smart law). The paper discusses its main theoretical characterises and highlights some practical implications for fields such as financial law, tax law and intellectual property law. Finally, it gives some hints about how engineers and academic lawyers can engage into a structural collaboration and seize in its full dimension the contemporary and ineluctable hybridity between legal rules and their technological implementation.