The launch of the Law & Technology Column through the collaboration between The Leaflet and Chanakya National Law University, Patna is not a routine academic initiative. It is a response to a structural transformation already underway.
Law is no longer negotiating power only through institutions we recognise - legislatures, courts, regulators. Increasingly, power is embedded in technological systems: in algorithmic decision-making, platform architectures, data infrastructures, automated compliance regimes, and privately governed digital environments that shape speech, markets, and identity at scale.
The terrain has shifted. Legal discourse has not kept pace.
In India, engagement with technology often oscillates between celebration and alarm. We either frame innovation as inevitability or treat regulation as obstruction. What is missing is sustained legal thinking that treats technology as a constitutional question - one that implicates accountability, equality, due process, and democratic control.
We litigate after deployment.
We regulate after disruption.
We theorise after harm.
The Law & Technology Column is an attempt to move that conversation forward - not reactively, but deliberately.
It is conceived as a platform for rigorous, developing-world scholarship on how technological systems redistribute power and challenge existing legal doctrines. Not a site for commentary alone, but for analysis that is attentive to institutional design, regulatory consequences, and constitutional implications.
India’s engagement with technology unfolds under conditions that differ sharply from those assumed by dominant global regulatory models. Scale, digital inequality, state capacity, public infrastructure, and constitutional commitments to dignity and access reshape the questions we must ask and the answers we can adopt.
We cannot simply import frameworks.
We must interrogate them. Adapt them. At times, resist them.
This column seeks to create continuity in a space currently marked by fragmentation.
A bridge between academic work and public discourse.
Between doctrinal analysis and policy design.
Between student scholarship and national regulatory conversations.
Because the next phase of legal transformation in India will not be driven only by litigation. It will be shaped by how law responds to algorithmic governance, digital public infrastructure, platform power, artificial intelligence, and data economies.
These are not niche subjects. They are becoming foundational to how rights are experienced and contested.
The collaboration between The Leaflet and CNLU institutionalises a commitment to engage with that reality seriously, through research, critique, and sustained dialogue.
This column will succeed only if it becomes a space where disagreement is possible, where analysis is rigorous, and where technological change is treated not as spectacle, but as a site of legal responsibility.
This note marks the beginning of that effort.