Part II
Mario G. LOSANO, Professor, Ph.D., Cybernetic systems and law: from social and cybernetic models to contemporary legal models
This paper is structured in two parts. The first one, published in the previous issue, examined the origins of the application of the cybernetic model to social sciences. The second part, published in this issue, analyses the impact informatics has on one particular sector of society: law.
Starting with the works of Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948), society is interpreted as a round structure or a retro-action. Wiener is principled against the extension of the concept of cybernetic system to social sciences. However, the Americans Easton, Deutsch, Etzioni, Beer and others try to apply to concept of cybernetic system to society. Later, the same idea will be taken over by Parson and Luhmann. If society is a cybernetic system, law is but a sub-system of it. Later, this vision over society imposed in a divided Europe following two different paths on both sides of the ‘Iron curtain’: on one side there were the theories of the Italian Vitorio Frosini, of the French Lucien Mehl, of the Swiss Ballweg, of the Austrians Land and Reisinger and, finally, of numerous Germans of the West (Fiedler, Kilian, Klug, Podlech, Philipps, Simitis, Steinmueller). In communist Europe the cybernetic vision of the world initially faced some difficulties, particularly due to the co-existence with the official doctrine of the dialectic materialism, but despite this the Polish Kisza, the cheque Knapp and the East German Klaus were able to conceive remarkable theories. The fact that we are faced with a more and more frequent application of informatics to law obliges us to resume contemporary techniques (such as the analysis of legal procedures, artificial intelligence, expert systems, etc.) in order to test to what extent theory and practice of most modern informatics may transform the traditional world of law.
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