The Law and Technology Enterprise: Uncovering the Template to Legal Scholarship on Technology
Kieran Mark Tranter · Law Innovation and Technology · 2011
Rapid transit in particular is as indispensable to [American cities'] progress as light, sewerage and water, and a system which is clean, quiet, cheap, easily controlled and occupying as little space as possible is universally demanded.3 The appearance of motor vehicles inspired Xenophon P Huddy in 1905, also in the Yale Law Journal, to examine automobiles and the existing road rules.He concluded that 'the automobile [is] one of the least dangerous of conveyances if properly driven', and did not require specific restrictive regulation.4 The nascent aviation industry prior to 1918 generated legal scholarship concerned with the sovereignty of airspace, 5 liability arising from aeroplanes 6 and the aeronautical laws of war.7 Similarly, the commercialisation of radio in the 1920s prompted legal writing on radio and the law of war, 8 ownership of radio-waves 9 and regulation.10 These discrete literatures provide evidence for a historical claim that lawyers have identified and written about the legal challenge of emerging technologies.However, these were isolated incidents.The law reviews were not inundated with lawyers writing about technology-even if, as Barton Beebe has observed, contemporary lawyers seem to write excessively about technology.11 The Table in the Appendix shows there are at least 92 specialist law journals dedicated to law and technology (JOLTs) (Journals of Law and Technology) and also journals focused on the law of specific technologies (JOLSTs).12 3 Ibid, 267.