For decades, law-and-tech scholarship has relied on intuition and analogy: a new technology arrives, legal scholars declare it “disruptive,” and commentary proliferates, particularly concerning its governance and affordances. Ryan Calo’s Law and Technology is an ambitious and lucid attempt to give an unruly field a shared intellectual backbone. Calo argues that this ad-hoc mode no longer suffices. Law’s relationship with technology, he insists, is clouded by what he calls “technological fog” (P. 86), which he describes as a recurring set of misconceptions that make technology appear inevitable, obscure human agency, and frustrate regulation. His response is a rigorous, four-step methodical approach (and he stakes his ground without hesitation: “methods are arguably what distinguish scholarship from other modes of inquiry”) designed to help legal analysis catch up with the social fact of technology.
Calo begins by grounding the reader in a deceptively simple insight: technology is not destiny but design. In Chapter One, “Technology as Social Fact,” he dismantles deterministic narratives by showing how law repeatedly mistakes contingent artifacts (driverless cars, AI systems, augmented reality) for unavoidable progress. The problem, he argues, is not that legal scholars fail to grasp how gadgets work, but that they may misunderstand the social contexts in which those gadgets operate. This diagnosis sets the tone for the rest of the book: technology confuses law because law tends to forget that technology is made by people with values and choices.
Chapter Two, “The Scale and the Reactor,” was reviewed on Jotwell when it was first published as an article. It turns to Science and Technology Studies (STS), drawing from its core insight that technologies are social artifacts. Calo uses STS to enrich the law’s understanding of technology while preserving the law’s pragmatic, normative orientation. His point is not to transform legal scholars into ethnographers but to borrow STS’s humility and contextual sensitivity while maintaining law’s “relentless pragmatism” and normative purpose. As he notes:
My own contact with STS has led me to see technology as a contingent bundle of affordances, rather than a stable construct, and to foreground the social and cultural forces behind it. Law, unlike STS, must decide who owes what to whom. (P. 79.)
Building on his earlier reflections about STS, Calo then offers a structured “methodical approach” that operationalizes those insights in legal analysis in Chapter Three. “Though This Be Madness” is the methodological heart of Law and Technology. Calo laments that legal scholarship rarely articulates its methods and proposes instead a methodical approach to the analysis of technology. His four-step framework (Pp. 116-17) invites scholars to (1) define and distinguish the technology under study; (2) examine how it alters human affordances; (3) surface the normative assumptions (priors) shaping their analysis; and (4) select among available legal and policy (power) levers for intervention. The framework is meant to discipline thinking rather than dictate writing and remains flexible enough to accommodate different theoretical orientations. Drawing inspiration from science and technology studies, affordance theory, and value-sensitive design, Calo’s approach transforms the usual “what should we do about X?” reaction into a transparent process linking descriptive accuracy to normative judgment. This model is equally valuable for researchers and policymakers.
The final chapter, “Application,” proves the method’s vitality. Calo walks through concrete studies and, most memorably, a tour of augmented reality and tort law. Here, he shows how AR unsettles tort’s fixation on the physical: when digital overlays alter someone’s perceived environment, harm can occur without contact. Calo proposes that tort evolve to recognize “contemporaneous alteration of the perceived environment” as actionable. The move is vintage Calo: creative, normatively modest but deeply insightful, and anchored in doctrinal craft. Later sections on “hacking machine learning” and other vignettes illustrate how the same four-step method can travel across technologies without lapsing into either hype or despair.
The book’s prose is clean and often witty (“law and technology scholars are still contemplating the horse” (P. 85)). Its structure makes it an ideal teaching text: each chapter builds from conceptual to practical, ending with a toolkit that demystifies technology while preserving law’s human focus. If there is a limitation, it lies in scope. The book’s empathy for method may leave readers wanting a fuller engagement with power and inequality in technology governance. Yet even here, Calo’s framework offers an invitation: methods, once shared, can evolve to include those very critiques.
I very much liked this book, in part because I understand the challenge Calo has undertaken. Having once attempted a similar methodological project myself, I appreciate both his ambition and his success in seeing it through. Law and Technology succeeds where so much tech-law writing fails: it slows us down. Calo teaches that careful definition, not speed, is what lets law see technology clearly. For scholars weary of chasing the latest acronym, this book offers something rarer: a way to think.
