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2 Law, Tech. & Hum. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/lwtchmn2 and id is 1 raw text is: https: :1th Iutedu auI LAW, TECHNOLOGY AND HUMANS Volume 2 (1) 2020 https://doi.org/10.5204/Ithj.v2il.1540 Introduction Law, Culture and Things: Human Links to the Material Richard Mohr Social Research, Policy and Planning Pty Ltd The following four papers come out of a project examining the relations between law, culture and things.1 They inquire into human links with the material world. These links are mediated through technology which, in its many forms, enables humans to fulfil material needs. Tools and their social organisation provide food, clothing, shelter and communication. This deep imbrication with all facets of our lives means that the ways technology is used and organised have profound importance for humanity and the environment. Technologies can be categorised as 'hard', involving manufacture and transport; 'soft' information and communication technologies; and 'wet' technologies of human sustenance, such as food production and preparation. Law regulates or constitutes each of these in one way or another, while it is most often associated with soft technologies used in record-keeping and artificial intelligence. This collection of papers examines the use of soft technology in law, as well as law as a means of directing the uses of technologies that impinge on the natural environment and the human body. These papers explore human and legal relations with technology and nature: legal records and decision-making; food and nutrition at the intersection of law, science and culture; rights of and to land and nature; and human responsibility for the environment and the impact of technology. Law conserves human memory in material records. For much of Western history these records have taken the form of documents, files, statutes and written judgements. Both Western and non-Western cultures have also used other material objects to symbolise and instantiate the law, including boundary markers, sacred pieces of wood, maces and coats of arms.2 Many of the material records of Western law are now being digitised, so that law's memory is stored in binary code, requiring information processing devices to access it. In the past the very materiality of law's objects - their solidity, presence and perseverance over time - have served to authorise and legitimise the law, as well as to conserve its substantive content. This persistence and conservation outlasted the authority and memory of any human actor and enabled the law to be transmitted from one generation to the next. 'The object makes our history slow', says Michel Serres.3 So what difference does it make that law's memory is now hidden in digital code? Does law removed from materiality lose authority as it loses material substance? Or are there other risks in this transition to the digital? Francesco Contini outlines some of those risks in his paper. i The authors of the four papers in this collection would like to acknowledge the contributions of the participants in an earlier discussion of this work at the Linking Generations for Global Justice conference of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law in Ofati on 20 June 2019. 2 Mohr, Enduring Signs; Mohr, Shifting Ground. 3 Serres, Genesis, 87. c K This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. As an open access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution. ISSN: 2652-4074 (Online) © The Author/s 2020

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