We are pleased to invite you to next week’s guest seminar on “Distributing Law: How P2P can influence legal thinking” by Dr Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (CNRS,LSE). Melanie is a permanent researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Institute for Communication Sciences and a visiting Fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science (Department of Media and Communications).

The event is open to all. Please distribute to your networks/other groups possibly interested in this.

When: Tuesday, 13th January 2015 16.00-18.00

Where: EB 303, Executive Business Centre

Do I need to book? No, just show up but please email akaranasiou@bournemouth.ac.uk so that we can check the room capacity etc.

Legal thinking can be influenced by architecture design principles based on decentralisation. Peer-to-peer architectures, for example distributed storage and wireless mesh network, disrupt the application of positive law and question central legal notions of liability, control, ownership and responsibility. I call for a transformation of legal thinking and logic and a theoretical break from envisioning the individual person as unique point of reference of the regulatory system composed by positive law and policies targeting individuals. Network theorists have already been conceptualising the agency of collectives, and commoners have been developing legal hacks to organise collective property. Beyond an individualised law trying to control distributed Information and Communication Technologies, peer-to-peer ways to think and design the law require to design collective rights and legal persons. Challenging liberal legalism design grounded in individualism requires to integrate peer-to-peer as a design principle for the law, towards the recognition of collectives as subjects of rights and duties, and the distribution of the law itself.