Law, Technology and Humans is an international, open access, peer-reviewed journal publishing original and innovative research concerned with the human and humanity of law and technology.

Supported by the QUT Faculty of Law, the journal was launched earlier this year alongside the QUT Law Lab and is one of four QUT-supported scholarly journals.

In his introduction, General Editor Professor Kieran Tranter notes:

Law, Technology and Humans aims for something different from the mainstream of technology law scholarship. Rather than repeating analysis born from the dominant narrative, it boldly presents itself as a portal to the multiverse of stories and methods through which to understand, dream, critique, build and live well in the technological present as it, with every planetary rotation, moves towards the technological future.

The foundation issue is in two parts. The first is a collection of papers linked to the themes of the recent symposium: Automation and Disruption in the Legal Profession:

• Lisa Webley, John Flood, Julian Webb, Francesca Bartlett, Kate Galloway and Kieran Tranter navigate through the manifestations of the technology metanarratives with their imaginings of the future of the legal profession.
• Kate Galloway, Julian Webb, Francesca Bartlett, John Flood and Lisa Webley take this vision of the adaptive professional and develop a blueprint for a new curriculum and approach to learning within the legal academy.
• Margaret Thornton writes up a study of the human present of NewLaw practice in Australia – how the decomposition to ‘gigs’, a desire for flexibility, and gender and generational divides are presenting a much more complicated reality than that of the wider discourse.
• Stebin Sam and Ashley Pearson report on the diffusion and utilisation of technologies in the community legal sector in Queensland, Australia.
• Felicity Bell and Justine Rogers examine the headline-grabbing technology – Artificial Intelligence. Drawing from social psychology, they build a sophisticated model of a lived, experiential ethics for the lawyer/AI hybrid.

The second part of this issue is dedicated to general articles:

• Kate Wilkinson Cross places law and technology with the Anthropocene.
• Hui Chia looks towards the deployment of robo-advisers in the financial services market.
• Sarah Hook and Sandy Noakes undertake a cartography of Australian employment tribunals and courts, attempting to chart the context wherein social media use by employees provides grounds for their dismissal.

This issue also includes a review of Virginia Eubanks recent book Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by journal book review editor Faith Gordon.

Call for submissions for the next issue

Submissions are now being accepted for Volume 2, Issue 1 to be published in May 2020.