Part I
Mario G. LOSANO, Professor, Ph.D., Cybernetic systems and law: from first computers to legal IT
This paper is structured in two parts. The first one, which is published here, examines the origins of the application of the cybernetic model to social sciences. The second part, which will be published in the next issue, will analyse the impact informatics has on one particular sector of society: law.
After the Second World War computers and their programmes, developed mostly for military reasons, were more and more largely distributed at the level of the civil society. They provide new models for the explanation of the society as a whole or only for some sectors of society such as law. Already in 1949, the American Lee Loevinger suggested the application of the emerging informatics to Common law and thus created a new discipline called ‘legal measuring’. In the context of continental European law ‘legal measuring’ is transformed into “legal cybernetics”, considering the particularities of the Civil law. Informatics and law are intimately connected in contemporary society. On one hand, the application of informatics to law created legal IT (e.g. e-government or the automation of public administration, legal databases, etc), while on the other hand the application of law to informatics created the law of informatics (e.g. e-commerce, personal data protection, criminal law of informatics, etc.)
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