Regulating Technologies: Legal Futures, Regulatory Frames and Technological Fixes

While it is a truism that emerging technologies present both opportunities for and challenges to their host communities, the legal community has only recently begun to consider their significance. On the one hand, emerging information, bio, nano, and neurotechnologies challenge policy-makers who aspire to put in place a regulatory environment that is legitimate, effective, and sustainable; on the other hand, these same technologies offer new opportunities as potentially powerful regulatory instruments. In this unique volume, a team of leading international scholars address many of the key difficulties surrounding the regulation of emerging technological targets as well as the implications of adopting technology as a regulatory tool. How should we rise to the challenge of regulating technologies? How are the regulatory lines to be drawn in the right places and how is the public to be properly engaged? How is precaution to be accommodated, and how can the law keep pace with technologies that develop ahead of the regulatory environment? How readily should we avail ourselves of the opportunity to use technology as a regulative strategy? How are we to understand these strategies and the challenges which they raise? To what extent do they give rise to similar policy problems accompanying more 'traditional' regulatory instruments or generate distinctive challenges? While the criminal justice system increasingly relies on technological assistance and the development of a 'surveillance society', is a regulatory regime that rules by technology compatible with rule of law values?