Law, Technology, and Society: The Critical Role of Science and Technology Studies in Legal Thought

STS not only helps theorise about science and technology but also brings the materiality of technology into the legal analytical frame. This entails examining the physicality and design of technologies as embodiments of power structures and as sites where potential discriminatory practices may occur. STS opens a critical space to theorise law, its apparatus, and its devices, whereas conventional liberal conceptualisations of law continue to portray the legal system as a coherent, neutral system based on logic and deduction.

Given the dominance of global technologies, the rapid flow of data, and the rise of related regulatory frameworks, research-based knowledge is essential for understanding the interplay between law and technological change.

STS and Its Relevance to Law

STS is an umbrella term for multidisciplinary and diverse approaches, encompassing the history of science and technology, participatory observation, and critical data studies. Rooted in the social constructivist tradition, STS asserts that science and technology are neither neutral nor autonomous, challenging deterministic understandings and applications. It foregrounds how technology is contingent on social forces while also revealing how scientific and technological advancements play a crucial role in reconstituting and shaping social relations.

Whereas there is a range of often divergent beliefs underpinning STS, what perhaps unites different approaches is their shared aim of understanding the relationship between technology and society and making visible the complexity of this relationship. To name a few examples, the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) highlights how social groups shape the outcome and design of a technology, whereas Actor-Network Theory (ANT) employs ethnographic methods to study networks of relationships between human and non-human actants, challenging what is often considered a purely “scientific epistemology.” It is indeed difficult to give a definitive account of what STS is. However, for this blog post, it may be sufficient to highlight that STS’s focus on the co-production of science, technology, and society illustrates how law becomes a constitutive force in institutionalising socio-technical structures.

The first practical implication of applying STS to legal analysis is setting aside naïve assumptions about technology being either unregulated or overregulated and instead focusing on the complex relationship between law, technology, and society. For example, STS can challenge mainstream assumptions that law is always “lagging behind” in regulating technology and force us to examine the objectives behind deregulatory approaches. STS provides analytical tools to reveal how the legal system understands, constructs, and represents technology.

For instance, STS can help explain why current regulatory frameworks keep pushing for techno-deterministic visions of technology. Technological change is often associated with the idea of linear progress; these visions of technology are both highly performative and normative, directly or indirectly shaping legal constructs that influence future societal arrangements. However, technological progress does not benefit society equally; it can reinforce existing power structures, making it essential to consider issues of distributive justice.

Insights from the Panel Discussion

As there are several ways in which STS can be incorporated into legal analysis, Anna Beckers and I organised a panel on STS and law during the conference Re-imagining Law for Sustainable Globalization: Navigating Uncertainty in a Globalized Era, to discuss how to combine these two fields.

Our panel brought together scholars working at the intersection of law and STS to share their experiences in deploying a research design that combines conceptual, analytical, and methodological diversity. Interdisciplinary analysis comes with inherent challenges, the most obvious of which is translation: each field has its own jargon and vocabulary, and the same concepts often carry different meanings depending on the field. With our panel, we aim to address these challenges and share our experiences in attempting to overcome them.

The panel kicked off with Sally Wyatt, Professor of Digital Cultures, providing some background information about STS. Sally showed that science and technology are full of politics, with consequences for law and for societal values. For example, developments in reproductive technologies, such as IVF and surrogacy, challenge religious and legal notions of who counts as a parent. A second point is that classifications have consequences. For example, the International Organization for Standardization’s standard for the classification of human sex is very binary, with options only for male, female and not applicable. This has consequences for the ways in which the myriad data that many of us freely and unthinkingly give when we are online are subsequently used. Third, materiality matters. Our understanding (as STS scholars, as legal scholars, as citizens) of every urgent social issue (e.g. migration, climate emergency, disinformation, pandemics, wars) would be improved by paying attention to the variety of people, animals, plants, artefacts, infrastructures, standards, classifications, maps, regulations, etc. involved, and to the relations between them.

Riikka Koulu, Associate Professor, specialising in the social and legal implications of AI, explained that she has gained significant insights from STS, particularly as a theoretical and methodological tool for examining the materiality and co-production of socio-technical systems, knowledge production, and the historical contextualisation of technology—as well as for fostering a reflective approach to research. As an example, she mentioned her work with Terhi Esko, in which they explored how law serves as a mechanism for normalising technologies and their embedded politics. During the discussion, Riikka also raised a two-fold question: Why is STS not mainstream in law and technology? And why is law not mainstream in STS? Regarding the first, she suggested that STS might be at odds with doctrinal law and may not align well with the more theoretical traditions of legal inquiry, despite its clear value. As for why STS has not fully embraced law, she attributed this, at least in part, to disciplinary boundaries and academic incentives. She speculated that STS scholars may perceive law as foreign or isolated from society and may simply not know where to begin.

My contribution (Marta Maroni) also explained how STS has enriched my legal analysis and explored a few key 'STS movements.' The first is the idea of taking the 'object of regulation' seriously. During my PhD, this led me down the rabbit hole of Internet development, its infrastructure, and governance structures. Learning about the invisible mechanisms behind how we use the Internet helped me analyze how the law has uncritically empowered technological development and forms of private governance (from the establishment of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to platforms). Conversely, these new power arrangements have profoundly transformed our legal system. Furthermore, I have examined philosophical concepts traditionally associated with technology, such as autonomy and neutrality, and studied how they have functioned as normative justifications for technology regulation. In particular, the concept of neutrality has been foundational in regulating digital media platforms in Europe. Finally, I have highlighted two scholars whose work has most influenced my 'constitutional' take on technology: Langdon Winner and Andrew Feenberg. Their investigations into power and authority embedded in technology are particularly relevant for understanding how highly centralised technologies impact democratic social order.

Luca Tenreira, PhD researcher in Law at EUI, discussed how his engagement with STS involves integrating key concepts—such as co-production and infrastructural thinking—into his project on Global Value Chain regulation. His Law-STS approach critically examines how multinational corporations mobilise specific knowledge regimes to assess the environmental and social impacts of products, services, and activities in contested landscapes. As regulatory paradigms increasingly incentivise accountability in global value chains, Luca’s research explores the epistemic challenges of framing environmental and social issues through particular indicators, metrics, and processes—highlighting their role in including or excluding certain narratives and stakeholders. Using ANT in a multi-sited ethnographic study, he examines material practices and activist interventions to reveal the normative consequences of such regulation. Luca also reflected on the evolution of STS from positivism to constructivism and more critical approaches like eco-feminism and decolonial thought. He concluded by emphasising STS’s relevance to the ontological turn in legal scholarship, advocating for the expansion of legal concepts to make them more fluid and responsive to contemporary challenges and lived experiences.

Anna Beckers, Professor of Private Law and Social Theory, centred her intervention on the benefits of STS for her CHAINLAW project and for understanding liability mechanisms in the context of digitalisation. She explained how STS helps her better grasp the role of technology in the context of global value chains. STS may, firstly, broaden the perspective of what qualifies as law and regulation. With STS, we not only see formal laws as the legal infrastructure as global commerce, but also knowledge production through material documents and related practices and the construction of technology itself. Second, relying on STS may lead us to identifying the agency of non-human technological actors and objects. STS can help here not only in allowing us lawyers to make visible such agency of material objects, but also in focusing on the social dimension of action and the underlying political economies; in contrast to what she calls ‘law and technology’ studies, an STS approach recognises the social dimension of technology and the relational discussion on affordances and takes a more critical and contextual approach towards law and technology.

The panel discussion then turned to pragmatic issues in interdisciplinary research, such as when to start, when to end, and the challenges involved. A key insight that emerged was that limited access to time remains the greatest obstacle to conducting meaningful interdisciplinary work. The discussion also explored how to integrate STS’s descriptive work with law’s analytical and normative frameworks. Eventually, we emphasised how good, thick descriptions can be inherently normative and how STS challenges the distinction between facts and norms, as the 'is' and the 'ought' often overlap.

Moreover, because STS also examines how societal forces (e.g., political economy) shape the use of technology, we discussed the implications for human-centric approaches to law. More specifically, we explored what STS can contribute to law, particularly since law is typically seen as a human construct. 

The discussion greatly benefitted from the questions and thoughtful input from colleagues in the Foundations of Law Department (Faculty of Law), the Sector Plan on Disinformation and Democracy, members of the ERC project CHAINLAW, and online participants. Sally concluded with the observation that good (interdisciplinary) research requires “time, humility, and respect.”