Operate for the Harmony: The Relationship Between Emerging Technologies and Legal System

ABSTRACT The innovation of emerging technologies has raised more demands on the law. In order to explore the relationship between emerging technologies and the legal system, this paper is based on Luhmann's systems theory, considering emerging technologies as products of scientific system. It constructs a static structural relationship between ‘scientific systems–social environment–legal systems.’ Additionally, it incorporates Prigogine's dissipative structure theory, supplementing the dynamic interaction process of energy among the three by redefining fluctuations and entropy values. There are actually two types of relationships between emerging technologies and the legal system: direct and indirect. The direct relationship involves the social environment as an intermediary. Emerging technologies participate in the operation of the legal system through social response, being outputted to the social environment. It forms the total energy of the environmental input system together with social expectations and then participates in the operation after being filtered by the screening diaphragm within the legal system. The indirect relationship operates through the structural coupling between the two systems. Emerging technologies themselves, as self‐referential entities within the legal system, participate in the operation. They indirectly influence the operation of the legal system through the entropy of their own operation in the scientific system.