Metajurisdiction

Contextual Quote

"We have been witnessing a structural unbundling of sovereignty. While the Westphalian model presupposes a one-to-one correspondence between territory, population, and governance, this correspondance is eroding under the pressure of the “network society.” As Castells notes, power has become increasingly fluid, dynamic, networked and distributed; but our legal systems remain locked in a territorial conception of sovereignty that evolves at the pace of precedent— not innovation. ... Meta jurisdictions are not a replacement for territorial legal systems but an extension of them: a way to compose existing legal features into new configurations that address problems those systems weren’t designed for. The features already available across jurisdictions is rich. Trusts, foundations, arbitration, choice of law, recognition regimes, corporate forms—these are mature tools, developed over centuries, battle-tested in courts and markets. What’s new is the extent to which our activities are digitally encoded— sufficiently so that there is now a possibility of combining these features to deliberately create virtualized legal spaces that serve novel purposes: AI governance, climate accountability, digital identity, new economic logics.

- Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera De Filippi [1]