Code-Driven Law NO, Normware SI!

The concept of code-driven law, i.e. of "legal norms or policies that have been articulated in computer code" by some actors with normative competence, has been convincingly elaborated by Hildebrandt [1]. Its introduction has the merit to refocus the discussion on the role of artificial devices in the legal activity, rather than on ontological positions expressed under code-is-law or law-is-code banners, which are present, with various interpretations and changing fortunes, in the literature and practice of contemporary regulatory technologies, and technology-oriented legal scholarship (see the overview in [2]). According to Hildebrandt, code-driven law should be distinguished from data-driven law, i.e. computational decision-making derived from statistical or other inductive methods, and from text-driven law, i.e. the legal activity performed by humans by means of sources of norms such as statutory and case law. A crucial difference between these forms of "law" is that the linguistic artifacts used in text-driven law are characterized by open-textured concepts (e.g.