Enabling “Code is Law”: Computational approaches to trade and data regulation

Short summary:

• Recent decisions by the Court of Justice of the European Union mirror a broad, and modern, shift in policy for ‘digital Europe’.
• Computational law has emerged as a vector of innovation in trade policy design.
• With the expansion of the digital economy and proliferation of information technology-enabled goods, computational approaches to regulation can supplement converging international trade and cross-border data transfer policies.
• An open source approach with a system agnostic focus on the ambitious challenge of expressing regulations in computational form may hold the key to realize global ‘borderless’ trade and transfers of data.