Infrastructures—whether physical, informational, digital—can have regulatory‐type effects. These include requiring, preventing, channeling, enabling, and nudging particular human and social behavior. Infrastructures also interact or compete with law. In these ways, infrastructures have major effects on social relations, identities, roles, capabilities, and possibilities. In today‘s world, infrastructures‐as‐regulation, and the enabling and controlling legal technologies and practices,...
Infrastructure Institutions: Democracy, Dictatorship, and Corporation
This paper investigates three models for subway building: New York City, Shanghai City, and Hong Kong. It argues that the NYC subway suffers from too much democracy, allowing for contestation between the NY city and state governments, different interest groups, and other stakeholders. In the Shanghai model, the city government centralizes power and resources and...
The Ordering Power of Digital Infrastructures and Their Legal Regulation
Physical and informational infrastructures are increasingly enmeshed with digital infrastructures, associated flows of data and analytics, and new forms of digital power, competition, and control. Enhanced digitalization and connectivity of infrastructures can change the ways infrastructures regulate and how law might regulate infrastructures. Digital infrastructures themselves have major regulatory effects that have long been conceptualized...
Transnational Legal Technologies Regulating Infrastructures-as-Regulation
Infrastructures of and for globalization are not governed by a comprehensive legal framework. Global commitments to the liberalization of trade in goods and services in bilateral, regional, and megaregional free trade agreements and the WTO regulate economic flows, but only to a very limited extent do they regulate the underlying facilitating physical, informational, and digital...