Future Law Works

The faculty of the St. Louis University School of Law invited me to deliver the 2017 Vincent C. Immel Lecture on Teaching Law on April 20, 2017. The lecture was not and is not designed for journal publication, but I thought that some (including the audience at SLU) might be interested in what I said. Some of my themes recapitulate things that I’ve written about before, on this blog, on other blogs, and/or in papers posted to SSRN. My remarks, extended and edited and with some end notes, appear below.

I am aggregating the posts from the recent online symposium at Prawfsblawg concerning two relatively new books: Gillian Hadfield’s Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy and The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind.  In different but related ways, both books are speaking to both global and local shifts — now well underway — in what law is, what law does, and what roles lawyers and other legal institutions play in economies and cultures.