To all lawyers out there, please don’t take this personally. Although I am a fierce enemy of administrative hurdles, this article is not about questioning the necessity of your profession.
Whilst laws, lawyers and justice are essential to govern most aspects of modern life, what about new technologies and radical innovation?
What does regulation do to an emerging technology? It might kill it before its true potential is known, thereby preventing progress. On the other hand, an emerging technology that gets out of hand unregulated might also create huge problems down the road. Think about nuclear power, where it is certainly a good thing to have some though regulations in place.
Let’s use the example of a large-scale geothermal energy project in St. Gallen, Switzerland.