Afterword

• Publication year: 2017

Afterword

Nicholas Torres

Forrest Lind III

AFTERWORD

Nicholas Torres^* Forrest Lind III^**

This year, Emory University School of Law celebrates its Centennial Year. As Emory Law celebrates a century of advancing the rule of law it also celebrates one hundred years of advancing society. Indeed, the two primary engines of societal progress are the laws that protect humanity and the innovations that enhance it as a whole. Yet, innovation and law are often at odds due to the nature of these concepts. Innovations create changes and the law must react to those changes. If technology is truly advancing it often pushes boundaries and quickly out paces the legislative process. Even when current laws are stretched by liberal interpretation, technology can still escape their scope. For the past century, the answer to this problem has been to empower agencies to regulate industries in the hopes that the agencies may move faster than a legislative body. However, as the speed with which the digital age blesses society with new innovations increases at an ever faster rate, agencies have reacted with power grabs for jurisdiction and a flurry of redundant regulatory schemes. Thus, as technology continues to advance, the United States' regulatory administrative state has become an increasingly restrictive bottleneck for innovation. In recognition of the constrain regulations place on innovation, the Emory Corporate Governance & Accountability Review decided to publish this "Law & Innovation" themed issue.

To examine the growing tension between the United States' large administrative state and innovators' desires for progress, ECGAR asked whether the administrative state could itself innovate to promote innovation. Four experts were chosen to answer this question. Three responded by investigating regulatory schemes attended to the fuel of modern innovation—the internet. To provide a more tangible view of the interplay of law and innovation, one expert used a worker's compensation law to demonstrate the often imperfect result of what happens when law attempts to catch technology.

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George F. Akers discusses the benefits innovation has to society as well as its legal cost in a manner that legal professionals can appreciate. Using online software as a service ("SaaS") as his canvas, Akers painted a picture of the risk and reward inherent in digital technologies. Although equity management platforms ("EPMs") and other electronic document management programs have been...