Lawmaking Culture in Digital Era
Pavel Stepanov · Journal of Russian Law · 2024
The isolated place of law in the cultural dimension of society necessitates the analysis of transformations of various sections of legal culture that occur under the influence of technical and technological factors. The dominance of the latter in a post-industrial society determines the formation of qualitatively new ideas about law and its manifestations, and can also influence the future of law and its nature. The basis of the regulatory action of law is lawmaking, which in the cultural system of society is both its product and a factor of its progress. The culture of lawmaking is currently, like the entire legal sphere, in the orbit of the technological imperative, perceiving the achievements of digitalization and having a reverse effect on the digital trends of legal development. The article defines the impact of digitalization on the development of modern lawmaking culture. The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach, methods of legal forecasting and legal modeling, supplemented by post-non-classical methodology of law, principles of constructivism and anthropocentrism, and a culturological approach to the study of legal reality. The revealed patterns of digital transformations in the modern culture of lawmaking allowed us to draw conclusions about the trends and prospects of its further transformation in the following directions: simplification of the substantive side of lawmaking through the active introduction of digital technologies both in the process of developing a draft normative legal act and in expert activity; embedding digital technologies in the stages and auxiliary procedures of the lawmaking process; symbiosis of legal and digital technologies in the preparation of a draft normative legal act; expansion of the subject composition of lawmaking participants and their acquisition of new skills and digital competencies; increasing the number of stages of the lawmaking process; modernization of forms and results of lawmaking (electronic normative legal act, digital standard of normative legal act, flexible regulators, digital law, machine-readable law); further evolution of lawmaking along the path of connection and convergence of “natural and artificial” (creation of hybrid systems “man-machine” in lawmaking, etc.); progressive movement and possible regressions under the influence of transformation of natural, manmade and social environmental factors.