About

Legal innovation is often approached from the angle of tools, their features and the productivity gains they promise.

Yet this approach leaves many questions open.

How do technologies transform the way we think and work? What becomes of professional knowledge when it is formalised in technical systems? How can human autonomy be preserved and developed in increasingly automated environments?

These questions cannot be resolved by technology alone.

They call for a dialogue between law, philosophy, the humanities and engineering.

It is in this meeting space that jerlash.labs takes its place.

To explore the transformations of law in the digital age and to turn the knowledge arising from this research into open methods, resources and technologies.

We want to contribute to a legal innovation that is not only more effective, but also more intelligible, more controllable and more shareable.

Think before building.

We consider that innovation must begin with asking the right questions. Philosophy and fundamental research are essential resources for questioning what is taken for granted, identifying problems and opening up new perspectives.

Experiment rather than presuppose.

Hypotheses must be capable of being tested against the uses and constraints of professional practice. We seek to combine conceptual reflection with applied experimentation.

Share rather than withhold.

The knowledge and tools produced are intended, where the conditions of their production and the applicable rights allow, to join a common heritage that is accessible and reusable.

Because the technologies that structure legal work should not be designed solely by those who sell them.

Legal professionals must be able to understand their working instruments, take part in their design and retain the ability to choose how they evolve.

A technological commons makes it possible to organise this participation around resources that are documented, open to discussion and capable of successive improvements.

This model rules out neither partnerships nor economic activities. It does, however, require a distinction between the value created collectively and the particular services that may help to fund it.

jerlash.labs is an independent initiative founded on the conviction that the contemporary transformations of law cannot be understood from a single discipline.

The project is aimed at legal professionals, researchers, academics, philosophers, engineers and institutions who wish to take part in this reflection and in putting it into practice.

It is developed from Belgium, with a European perspective and particular attention to continental legal traditions.

The name jerlash is a phonetic nod to Étienne-Constantin de Gerlache, a Belgian historical figure.

It also refers to the avenue de Gerlache, where the law office of the laboratory’s founder is located.

This twofold anchoring, historical and geographical, symbolically links the project to the world of law while giving it an identity of its own, deliberately turned towards experimentation and the future.

• The site’s texts are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; the code of the tools will be published under the MIT licence.
• Each published tool will describe the data path, the tests carried out and the known limitations.
• Nothing is charged for and nothing is sold.