The drafting process sets the course for good laws. Legislators bear great responsibility here. Laws are societal strategies for successful living conditions in an entire society. For millions of people. Law creates new conditions in complex systems and thus changes these systems. New complexity arises with intended and unintended consequences. How can system-adequate, strategic, and thus far-sighted solutions be embedded in our laws? How do we shift from a mode of repairing toa mode of systemic design? What does law look like in the exponentially increasing complexity of our society and its living conditions? These questions necessitate an interdisciplinary approach. Legislation and strategic policy development can only be thought of together. At ZGDigital, we work on this legal science.
Legislation is now faced with inventing its own future. The future of law. ZGDigital is part of thisevolution.
How do we design legislation and its implementation for an increasingly digital world?
Legislation and implementation are becoming digital. The growing pressure on existing complex regulatory systems worldwide is prompting the public sector to seek alternatives. How can norms be translated as directly as possible into automated applications? Terms like Code as Law, Rules as Code (RaC), and Machine-readable Legislation discuss different approaches and are being tested in pilot projects by some countries. The range of approaches extends from proposals on how existing legal rules can be transferred into code to RaC projects that integrate digital technologies directly into the legislative process. Will legislation fundamentally be redesigned in the future? Is the future of rules code? Will legal application thus be placed on a new, digitalbasis?
At ZGDigital, we design concepts, standards, and pilot applications for the end-to-end digitalization of legislation, administrative implementation, and corresponding compliance incompanies.
Both areas of ZGDigital's work, the methodological development of the initial draft of a law and the digitalization of legislation, are necessarily interconnected. Central and connecting for both is Rulemapping, developed by Stephan Breidenbach in 2002. Rulemapping visualizes rules and processes in the context of their application.
In legislation, Rulemapping enables norms to be designed precisely, transparently, and comprehensibly. In digital implementation, especially in administration and corporate compliance, Rulemapping serves no-code end-to-end automation.
The clear structure of the law was made possible primarily through the first-time use of a visualization software that Prof. Dr. Stephan Breidenbach from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) had played a significant role in developing. The software considerably facilitated the discussion, structuring, and decision-making in individual matters and contributed to a clear and logical structure of this law, said the chairman.
The Center for Legislation was founded in 2007 by Stephan Breidenbach at the European University Viadrina. Soon, alongside the science of law-making, the question arose of how legislation should be conceived digitally, leading to a new name. The interdisciplinary center is led by Ulla Gläser and Stephan Breidenbach.
