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ABSTRACTTechnology law scholarship has a tendency towards the dramatic. Technology causes disruption. Law must catch-up; it must ensure potential benefits from technology and avoid potential harms. There are even concerns that law, as an organiser of human life, is itself becoming eclipsed by forms of technological management. What is often not focused on is the practical process through which concerns about technology become transmuted into legal forms within specific jurisdictions. This paper examines the 23 years of Australian law concerning embryos and human cloning. Inspired by Carl Schmitt’s criticism of modernity’s political institutions and the laws they produce, what is identified is a machine that runs itself. It is shown to be a highly automated process whereby technical experts manage competing values. Rather than law regulating technology or technology regulating law; the Australian study suggests that law and its making, is technological.

ABSTRACTThis paper takes Die Buribunkenseriously as good science fiction. It is argued that it is good science fiction as it provides tropes, images and narratives through which the technological present and possible futures can be comprehended. Specifically, the Buribunks who confidently archive the self, present as a cypher for informational existence. Through learning about the Buribunks’ institutional organisation and deep motivations the various ways that the self becomes recorded in the digital can be mapped. However, the present is not Buribunkian, the self and its data-doubles are fragmented and conflicted, generated by surveillance, the data serfdom of worker-nodes, curatorial social media practices and ‘dark’ activities that try to hide personal responsibility. Nevertheless, the Buribunks drive to master the archive, encapsulates a tendency in the digital towards correspondence and unity within data repositories of the self.

ABSTRACTThe regulation of driving and cars has taken on increasingly criminal guises. Apart from the role of insurance companies and motor vehicle registries, criminal law has stepped in to penalise drivers and car owners through more draconian measures. This article examines the problems that this presents for Indigenous drivers whose concepts of automobility are at odds with those of the nation state. It details the judicial narratives of this collision of automobilities in sentencing Indigenous drivers to argue that the Australian ‘settler state’ is continuing the practice of using mundane regulatory laws to dismantle and assimilate Indigenous communities.

This empirical study analyses the extent to which the Productivity Commission (Commission) relies on different types of evidence in formulating recommendations in a sample of reports. It goes deeper than traditional citation analysis; rather than classifying and counting all material cited in each sample report, it includes only citations that influenced the final recommendations. The findings, which run counter to the rhetoric employed in relation to the Commission's work, reveal the extent to which the Commission relies on non-quantitative forms of evidence, including bare assertions, personal experience, and logical and legal arguments, particularly in reports addressing broader questions of social policy. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of these findings, linking them to Graycar's critique of law reform commissions. As such, it provides a more accurate, but still preliminary, basis for understanding the Commission's methods than that otherwise appearing in the discourse surrounding the Commission's work.

This article analyses HLA Hart's legal positivist theory through the life and music of the English band Oasis. It is argued that bringing Hart and Oasis into co-orbit reveals a fundamental ambiguity and anxiety within Hart's jurisprudential performance. It is argued that Oasis’ self-confidence compares to Hart's certainty of a distinction between law and morality and Oasis’ populism echoes Hart's claim of law as dependent on communal assent. However, an examination of Oasis also makes visible an essential critique of the certain and voluntary nature of Hart's system. Oasis’ performances, on and offstage, highlight the undisclosed essentiality of violence within The Concept of Lawthat betrays ambiguity and anxiety regarding core elements of Hart's jurisprudential performance; the role of officials and the clarity of rules.

This article argues that scholarship on law and technology is a thoroughly speculative activity. The textual signifiers of this speculative orientation are the multiple incursions of science fiction that locate and justify lawyers writing about technology. Through a detailed examination of three law and technology literatures – on early space technology, IVF and virtual worlds – it will be shown that science fiction is the storehouse of images and imaginings that substantiate the legal projection of technological futures. When law confronts technology, science fiction is its speculative jurisdiction. The suggestion is that through a more through-going engagement with science fiction as the speculative jurisdiction, law could engage more adequately with the complexities and contingencies of technological change.

This article maps responses to the question of law and technology. While there is much literature that considers law and technology, deeper connections have been underappreciated. In particular, the general and historical dimension of the legal engagement with technology, the cultural and social mediations between law and technology, and the technology of law itself have been neglected. Through mapping where these connections have been made, the following contributions to this special issue of the GLRon ‘The Laws of Technology and the Technology of Law’ can be appreciated.

There are three claims concerning clinical legal education (CLE) in the Australian literature. The first, associated with CLE’s 1970s heritage, is the claim that CLE is about the study of injustice and the progressive practice of law. The second is that CLE is about skills training. The third is that CLE is about effecting personal value change in students through exposing them to the ‘different side of society’. The recent documentary Street Practice(2004), as a representation of CLE in Australia, revealed the highly problematic nature of CLE as value change. It showed that emphasis on value change through ‘ethical training through experience’ presents CLE as another site for the hierarchy, manipulation and egotism long identified by critical accounts of legal culture. Furthermore, at the very moment when conservatism is on the rise in Australia, CLE — in talking and aiming for value change — seemingly has abandoned its progressive origins and joined in this lurch to the right.