ABSTRACT
The story of the technological disruption of Law has two stages: first, new technologies disrupt Law 1.0 and encourage the emergence of Law 2.0, and second, Law 2.0 is disrupted by the availability of technologies as regulatory tools, leading to Law 3.0. One form of unfitness is seen where the substance of prevailing legal rules no longer is appropriate relative to the desired regulatory purposes; the rules at issue need to be changed. Another form of unfitness is seen where the prevailing legal rules simply make no provision for the technology or its application; in other words, the deficiency takes the form of a gap or an omission. To rectify the problem, there needs to be a bespoke regulatory response. Through the last two centuries, new technologies and their applications have systematically disrupted some of the cornerstone principles and rules of Law 1.0, highlighting the lack of fitness of traditional standards for societies that are undergoing rapid industrialisation.
