Fragments and Continuities of Law and ICT: A Pragmatist Approach to Understanding Legal Pluralism

This chapter looks at new networked communication and information technology from the perspective of legal pluralism. The law governing ICT is one of the main areas in which legal orders interact and conflict. In opposition to legal theories that see the interaction of legal orders as problematic and limited, she contends that our experience with networked communication can be theorized more fruitfully from a pragmatist perspective. Such a pragmatic and interactional theory of legal pluralism is open to the fragmentation and dynamic plurality of normative orders relating to the Internet. At the same time, it can accommodate the growing connections between information technology and our everyday embodied existence