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Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination.

This special section on ‘Tech and the Transformation of Legal Imagination’ is an attempt at creatively exploring the law of the tech era. We believe that emerging lines of continuity and discontinuity in the current moment of tech-induced legal transformation are insufficiently investigated. Together with the authors of this special section, we therefore set out in an effort to recover and reimagine the histories of the law/tech nexus, to critically examine the imaginaries operative in the ongoing transformation but also to imagine the future of law. In so doing, we cover two different constellations: one in which the law is imagined, and another in which the law imagines. As this structure is one that operates in other disciplines, too—computer science is imagined as much as it imagines—we believe it will be a useful entry point for readers beyond the discipline of law to explore the relation between tech, law and imagination. In all, we make a move from the general theme of tech, legal transformation and imagination to the more specific one of tech and the transformation of legal imagination.

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before!

Gardens and Justice have been joined as figurae, genres and topoi in the classical writings of Virgil, in the Old Testament text of Genesis and the Garden of Eden, in Milton's epic of Paradise Lost, in Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England, and not the last, in Neil Young's lyrics 'After the Garden', in his 2006 album Living with War These and numerous other texts are peopled by figures who live at home, and others who depart from home.