The Challenges of Digital Democracy, and How to Tackle Them in the Information Era

Abstract

Scholars examine legal hard cases either in the name of justice, or in accordance with the principle of tolerance. In the case of justice, scholars aim to determine the purposes that all the norms of the system are envisaged to fulfil. In the second case, tolerance is conceived as the right kind of foundational principle for the design of the right kinds of norms in the information era, because such norms have to operate across a number of different cultures, societies and states vis-à-vis an increasing set of issues that concern the whole infrastructure and environment of current information and communication technology-driven societies. Yet the information revolution is triggering an increasing set of legal cases that spark general disagreement among scholars: Matters of accessibility and legal certainty, equality and fair power, protection and dispute resolution, procedures and compliance, are examples that stress what is new under the legal sun of the information era. As a result, justice needs tolerance in order to attain the reasonable compromises that at times have to be found in the legal domain. Yet, tolerance needs justice in order to set its own limits and determine whether a compromise should be deemed as reasonable.