Alexey Ivanov at the RCCA Session of the St. Petersburg Legal Forum

On May 15th, the Russian Corporate Counsel Association (RCCA, non-commercial partnership) held the 7th Annual Scientific and Practical Conference, the theme being: "Futurology in Jurisprudence: How to make the new Russian legal ideas global", and it was delivered with the participation of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia, and the Ministry of Justice of Russia, together with the support of the audit and consulting firm EY, the international law firm Dentons, and the Goltsblat BLP law firm. The event was held within the framework of the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum. Director of the Institute Alexey Ivanov acted as speaker.

Welcoming the participants of the conference, Alexandra Nesterenko, President of the RCCA, noted that the future of law is of concern to all lawyers, because relations arising in society should be formalized by new norms and, of course, members of RCAA aim to take a leading role in the creation of such norms. Information on the replacement of lawyers by robots has concerned our members, said Nesterenko, and we want to understand how justified these fears indeed are.

 

The moderator of the first part of the conference, Ruslan Ibrahimov, Corporate and Legal Director of Mobile TeleSystems, pointed out the creativity of this conference, which gives participants the opportunity to speculate on the trends of Russian law, referring specifically to the future. As Ibrahimov noted, every word in the title of the conference deserves special attention, but in particular its second part, which puts before the participants of the event an open question: "How to make the new Russian legal ideas global?". Referring to the experience of communicating with foreign colleagues, Ibrahimov said that Russian jurisprudence is now gaining a fairly good pace of development and on the whole is keeping pace with high technologies, and sometimes is ahead of foreign law regimes in regulating the information environment. In confirmation of the relevance of the topic chosen for the conference, Ruslan Ibrahimov also drew attention to the legal documents discussed that day, among which he singled out a draft program for the development of the digital economy and the Strategy for Information Society Development in the Russian Federation for 2017-2030.

 

Alexei Ivanov noted that "the digital economy is not at all something futuristic, but rather represents a reality that we are dealing with right now." Speaking of a more distant future, in Ivanov's view, truly breakthrough development should be expected in the least obvious areas, and in particular in the field of biotechnology. Turning to history, Alexey spoke to the participants about four stages of the evolution of the concept of personality and the notion of subjectivity, stressing that the modern generation lives at the end of the stage of understanding the individual through the prism of human rights. The new technological reality and the emergence of artificial intelligence will inevitably entail a new evolutionary coil in the understanding of personality and subjectivity. Furthermore, the blurring of the boundaries of statuses of sanity, and also the changing nature of gender identity, present issues which already raise the question of what are the inherent characteristics of a person and personality, and where in fact the subjectivity boundary lies. As an illustration, Alexey gave his legal interpretation of Stanislaw Lem's story "The Twenty-First Voyage" from the series The Star Diaries of Ijon Tichy.

 

 

Reference material: RCCA website