While studying IT & Privacy Law at my law school in Chicago I was fortunate enough to attend a legal class that asked this exact question. The course was shaped by an article written by Judge Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit in 1996. Judge Easterbrook claimed that studying technology as it states to law was a waste of time. Judge Easterbrook expressed the idea that legal battles that result from technology can be solved by the underlying law behind the technology in an article entitled The Law of the Horse. For example, if there is a dispute between a contract formed between a company online and a user agreement, the underlying law behind the dispute will result in the lawyers looking at contract law, not some special legal law related only to technology.

By the end of the class, we all came to the agreement that when laws are passed in order to combat issues that might arise between law and technology, technology always finds a way to flow past the law.

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