Foreword

• Author: David Johnston
• Profession: Faculty of Law McGill University Chair, Canadian Information Highway Advisory Council President, University of Waterloo
• Pages: 15-16

FOREWORD

to the First Edition

This book is a gem. It is essential for anyone — lawyer or non-lawyer

— interested, intrigued, or impaled by the challenge modern informa-

tion technology poses for the rule of law. It is Canadian in the sense

that much of its data is Canadian-based. But it will be read with profit

by anyone, in any jurisdiction, who must deal with the information

revolution and the necessary adjustments in private and public law.

The book is a judicious, well-tempered balance of theory and prac-

tice. It gives enough technological background to understand the prob-

lem and challenge of the computer and communications transformation.

It selects legal puzzles drawn from a kaleidoscope of fact patterns from

a busy and rapidly changing law practice. It explains and expounds the

law, its adaptability, its limits, and then advances reforms concisely and

clearly. It will be valuable to specialized, as well as general, lawyers and

law students and to non-lawyers interested in these technological

changes and the law’s response. It is organized elegantly and written elo-

quently — in short, a joy to read. Choice, selection, focus, and synthe-

sis are precious gifts in crafting the knowledge society from the

Information Age. The author displays these gifts splendidly.

The author has practised computer law for a dozen years and

taught it for half that time at two eminent Canadian law schools. The

book reflects the distilled wisdom of that experience. The author wres-

tles with practical, urgent, and endlessly novel problems by imagina-

tively conceptualizing them in an intellectual framework that takes one

back to first principles. The book also demonstrates a scholar’s love of

history. The author skilfully compares the law’s response to other relat-

ed technologies from the printing press forward. And, in one especial-

ly intriguing analysis of the evolution of the “signature” for contractual

authentication, he reaches back to the Old Testament book of Ruth to

describe the giving over of one of a pair of sandals to a contracting

party trader in a commercial transaction. The one sandal would be

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