Digital technologies currently have, and will have in the future, a significant impact on legal rules. The legal framework will have to adapt, if not to renew itself, to make technological development as smooth as possible, in full consistency with the founding principles of our legal orders. Today's students will be tomorrow’s driving force behind these transformations. They therefore have to be exposed to these issues and tackle the impact of digital technologies (i.e. robotics, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, blockchain and smart contracts, etc.) on legal orders. Moreover, the real nature of digital technologies (a still under-regulated ecosystem, without physical borders) requires an EU approach. TechLa aims to develop a new educational approach using prospective law clinics culminating in moot courts, and Spring schools, in order to raise students’ awareness about the challenging legal implications posed by digital technologies. This educational experience will also serve as a legal experiment to generate research and legal recommendations on law & technology, with which the students will be associated. TechLa has the following objectives: • Pedagogical: applying legal theory to upcoming/prospective cases at the intersection of law and technology, and contributing to drafting possible new legal rules; • Professionalization : o training students, through the clinical approach and on the basis of the moot court method, to real-life professional situations (lawyers, magistrates) leading them to embody lawyers and magistrates’ functions (writing of legal acts and pleadings) in real conditions (at a court); o building new legal capacities that are out of traditional curricula (law and new technologies) for Bachelor and Master level students , improving their employability as legal experts in the digital economy. • Research: o Drafting of scientific papers suggesting innovative legal approaches dealing with digital technologies (e.g. autonomous vehicle, home automation, companion robots); o Finding a common legal approach at the EU level as regards legal challenges raised by digital technologies o building an EU expert group, involving academics, students, practitioners and industrial actors and contributing to national and EU institutional initiatives in this area. TechLa will: • develop five experimental digital technologies prospective law clinics, testing identical issues in separate legal environments (France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland) => TechLa moot courts and spring schools • provide a sustainable methodology for comparing and contrasting legal systems, determining the common legal denominators and then proposing a possible common legal framework as part of a future European legal framework both for legal practitioners and for EU citizens = > TechLa methodology guide and web-based platform • showcase the project on the social media and during students’ fairs and information days, to attract new students, new partners and in general create awareness among new audiences => awareness raising activities and audiovisual materials • co-write with students and Techla associated partners scientific articles pursuing the legal analysis initiated in the prospective law clinics, constituting elements of prospective multidisciplinary doctrine for practitioners, academics and tech companies => TechLa research papers TechLa will take an open approach, focusing on sharing, via an open-access web-based platform, that will ensure the transferability of the skills acquired and of the legal solutions evaluated by the students. TechLa will involve 276 students from France, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands, who will be supervised by law academics from 5 universities and coached by magistrates, engineers and lawyers from each represented country. Exploitability and replicability of TechLa will be verified in various public and private sectors such as courts, tech companies in different areas (smart transport, blockchain, online marketing and smart energy sectors), and lawfirms that are specialized in new technologies. TechLa’s new training approach will improve agility in decision making of current and future legal experts, give rise to new teaching profiles/fields, and lead to sustainable changes on how to anticipate the risks associated with developing off-the-shelf products or in basic research.
Our project had the following objectives: - At the pedagogical level, it was a question of offering students an original approach to their studies from a double point of view. First of all, in order to compensate for the classically theoretical character, often compartmentalized and reduced to the national scale of traditional law studies, we wanted to encourage our students to work on future and potential concrete cases, related to new technologies issues (largely neglected until then in traditional programs) and requiring a multidisciplinary approach (allowed by the inclusion in the project of business students, engineering students but also companies in the new technologies sector) and international (by creating a network of European Universities allowing students to confront the adaptation capacities of the legal systems). In doing so, we wanted to invite them to discover what makes the added value of future practitioners : their ability to anticipate legal disputes, to propose innovative solutions and thus participate in the development of possible new legal rules. - In terms of student professionalization, we wanted to: o on the one hand prepare students, through the legal clinic and on the basis of the mock trial method, for professional situations in real life by bringing them to embody in real conditions (instruction of the trial and hearing in court) functions of lawyers, magistrates and experts (drafting of legal acts - requests, memoranda, conclusions, judgments - and pleadings). This scenario, supported by the support of each group of students by magistrates or lawyers and by economic actors in the sector concerned, should allow everyone to understand the expectations of the professional world (hard skills but also soft skills), to concretely test their abilities (the drafting of acts is not usually practiced at this level of study) and to confirm their choice of professional orientation. o on the other hand, lead them to develop new legal skills (Law of new technologies) which come out of the traditional study programs at the bachelor's and master's level, and which improve their employability as legal experts in the field of digital economy. - In terms of scientific research, we wanted to initiate and then develop discussion on the establishment of a common legal approach at EU level concerning the legal challenges posed by digital technologies, in order to stimulate (in particular through the creation of a web platform) the emergence of a group of European experts, consisting of academics, students, practitioners and economic actors in order to contribute to national and European institutional initiatives in this domain. Our project was thus intended to encourage the writing of scientific articles suggesting innovative legal approaches to so-called « artificial intelligence » technologies.
Digital technologies currently have, and will have in the future, a significant impact on our lives through the legal rules that organize them. The legal framework will have to adapt or even renew itself, to accompany technological development, guaranteeing its full coherence with the main principles of our legal orders and more particularly with the necessary protection of fundamental rights. Today’s students will tomorrow be the driving force behind these transformations. They must therefore face the challenges and risks of new technologies (robotics, “artificial intelligence”, digital platforms, blockchain, smart contracts, Metavers, etc.) and concretely anticipate their impacts on legal orders. To do this, they must be confronted with the “real life” of the law, in other words with extremely concrete situations allowing them to understand legal issues in all their dimensions, that is, taking into account human, economic and social issues ; they must also, because technological innovations grows at a faster pace than law-making, anticipate regulatory needs by working on emerging technologies for which no specific regulations are yet in place. These technologies, which constitute an ecosystem that is still under-regulated and without physical boundaries, are part of a globalized framework. The management of their regulation seems to us therefore to be thought beyond the state level. In this respect, the European Union, which constitutes a model of regional integration, appeared to us to be a relevant scale for confronting the resources and shortcomings of the existing legal systems and proposing concrete regulatory projects in line with both the capacities and the technological development needs of a modern society on the one hand, and the imperatives of population protection on the other. Our TechLawClinics project therefore aimed to meet a fourfold need: the need to develop a new multidisciplinary pedagogical approach using prospective legal clinics providing for the holding of mock trials and international Spring Schools in order to make students aware of the legal issues related to digital technologies ; the need for support expressed by companies operating in the sector of new emerging technologies, wishing to secure their innovations in terms of legal acceptability ; the need for training expressed by legal practitioners attached to anticipating the handling by the courts of litigation involving the use of new technologies still ignored by the Law; finally the need to generate, from the resolution of our prospective legal clinics, scientific research and concrete recommendations likely to support, stimulate and improve through a practical approach the implementation of the law of new technologies at European level.