Education in an Era of Convergence

Abstract

This paper considers alternatives to strict disciplinarity, particularly in legal education, in light of the increasing importance of problem spaces that cross disciplines including computational law and cyber security. It is a short provocation rather than a broad-ranging inquiry and focuses on law/computer science collaborations. It asks three questions that are increasingly controversial: (1) What might be done within disciplinary programs, such as law, to prepare students to work wisely alongside engineered systems? (2) What might be done to develop students’ skills at cross-disciplinary problem-solving throughout their education? (3) Should we offer undergraduate degrees oriented not around a discipline but a problem-space; for example, should computational law be a new discipline?