Also included is a new article from Johnson called "The Life of Law Online" that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to think about where law is headed in an increasingly online world.

The new article ends with this paragraph:

Our geographical, sovereign law may be well suited for regulating physical things and protecting us from real world threats. It will undoubtedly persist in its own appropriate environmental niche. But, even in that context, we would do better to treat it as an organism, rather than a mechanism — viewing it as a complex whole, disallowing efforts to redesign it from outside, discrediting efforts to analyze it by reductionist means. In any event, we must recognize that our current legal organism, transplanted online, will not prosper. As we interact globally over the Internet, we create a new non–local citizenry, a netizenry, occupying many different kinds of online spaces that both need and can create rules of their own. The new global metabolism will produce new forms of social order that use fundamentally different forms of repair, goal setting and legitimation. Our old meta–meta–story of citizen consent to a social contract empowering a territorially local government just won’t work in this new context. But new repair mechanisms, new complex systems, new forms of social order will arise. These will involve voluntary navigation and filters, not voting. They will demand and receive deference from local legal regimes, because they will be better than any current legal systems at creating social order online. Long live the new legal organisms of the net.

A profound and fascinating article. Johnson's writings have been a big influence on my thinking for many years and he is one of the giants in both the legal aspects of technology and the use of technology by lawyers. I'm thrilled to learn that Johnson will be speaking at ABA TECHSHOW 2006, where I hope to meet him and say thank you in person.

Technorati tag: Law2.0

• Technorati acquires AOL
• Corante acquires Six Apart
• Digg acquires Slashdot (after itself being gobbled by someone huge, rich, and smart)
• eBay acquires Martindale Hubbell ("What kind of pie?" — and fixes the latter's broken feedback system)
• The shelf life of cell phones and iPods shrinks from 8 to 4 months
• Laudable efforts to avoid the terms "vertical" and "space" in their business/economic sense become as challenging as in 2000 (if not more so)
• John Battelle renames his conference

[Technorati tag: predictions2006]

predictions2006