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Law in The Virtual Era The Modern World

Law often struggles to keep pace with innovation and new technologies. When law does catch up, it risks stifling further innovation through over-regulation. As the world transitions to the virtual age, the biggest challenge for law is to remain comprehensive enough to address new issues, while also allowing innovation to continue and thrive. Both over-regulation and poor enforcement of existing laws can impede progress by creating obstacles where the role of law should be to enable new developments. For innovation and a country's culture to be sustainable, there must be legal protections, but without shortcuts or inhumanity that will ultimately fail and cause long term problems.

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Bruv Bravo
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34 views1 page

Law in The Virtual Era The Modern World

Law often struggles to keep pace with innovation and new technologies. When law does catch up, it risks stifling further innovation through over-regulation. As the world transitions to the virtual age, the biggest challenge for law is to remain comprehensive enough to address new issues, while also allowing innovation to continue and thrive. Both over-regulation and poor enforcement of existing laws can impede progress by creating obstacles where the role of law should be to enable new developments. For innovation and a country's culture to be sustainable, there must be legal protections, but without shortcuts or inhumanity that will ultimately fail and cause long term problems.

Uploaded by

Bruv Bravo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as ODT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Law in the virtual era; the modern world

Law and innovation have never walked hand in hand. Law has always been
chasing innovation and when it catches up with it…kills it. In Kenya, we tend
to think that all our problems will be resolved by passing new and more
stringent laws. This is a fallacy. Paraphrasing Cicero, we can say, “the more the
laws, the less the justice”. Most innovations happen where law is lacking…and
when law jumps in to regulate the space, innovation is choked.

The biggest challenge for law in this new era as we transition from the
contemporary world into the e-era, the virtual age, is how to make law
comprehensive and elastic enough to foresee the challenges of innovation and
keep it alive.

This temptation to over-regulate and pass always new and more stringent laws
is not only in the mind of every legislator and lawyer, but it sadly also finds its
way into legal education. At the very core of what we teach young lawyers
there is always the idea of regulation. We teach students to regulate, we
applaud their dissertations and essays when they deal with regulating
unregulated spaces and make a living out of it.

The challenge is twofold. On the one hand, we easily fall into over-regulation,
and the state stops being the enabler to become the obstacle to progress. We
want to foresee all possibilities and we do so by choking development. On the
other hand, we have a passion for not enforcing and follow through the laws
that we have passed.

I remember when the famous Michuki rules were passed. A friend of mine set
up a business to install speed governors. Soon after Michuki stepped out of the
Transport Ministry, he sold the business. He was going bankrupt. We have a
chronic disdain for law enforcement, and we only get serious about it when
there is an immediate economic or political gain at stake. In fact, I usually say,
with realistic sarcasm, that we deal with everything as we deal with copyright,
“you have the copyright while I have the right to copy”.

There is amazing innovation happening in Africa, and innovation without legal


protection is not sustainable…just like inhuman innovation which is bound to
fail. Our shortcuts will eventually turn against us and our culture; short term
gain, long term pain…as it happened in the famous Kikoi dispute.

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