Digital jurisprudence aims to extend traditional rule-of-law ideals into the virtual digital society to ensure social order and fairness in the digital age. Photo: TUCHONG

Digital jurisprudence, as a discipline devoted to the study of law in the digital domain, the legal phenomena it entails, and their patterns of development, continually generates new questions as digital technologies evolve. The vigorous development of China’s digital economy and the accumulation of governance experience have created important a priori conditions for the advancement of digital jurisprudence. With the continued advancement of digital technologies, the greatest difficulty in knowledge acquisition has shifted toward the indeterminacy of cognitive objects; the emergent, interactive, and disruptive characteristics of digital technologies further intensify this indeterminacy. Excessive reliance on traditional legal paradigms risks gradually depriving digital jurisprudence of its discursive capacity and exposing it to a growing number of “anomalous” situations. This makes the establishment of a new paradigm necessary.

Dilemma of constructing a knowledge system

Uncertainty has not impeded progress in digital jurisprudence. However, in both the construction of its knowledge system and legal practice, many dilemmas do arise from the uncertainty generated by digital technological innovation. Firstly, in the course of development, digital technologies entail ethical risks associated with autonomy that differ from the anthropocentric value logic of human society. Secondly, technical logics such as emergence, interactivity, and “deceptive alignment” increase the difficulty of explainability, making effective governance under regulatory models premised on legal certainty problematic. Ultimately, the cognitive divergence between the digital world and legal scholarship renders research that combines “the digital” and “jurisprudence” prone to falling into “knowledge illusions.”

First, the primary purpose of any discipline is the acquisition of knowledge. Humans come to understand being through language and, through that understanding, acquire knowledge. The ambiguity inherent in both legal language and digital language makes cognitive alignment between the two difficult to achieve. Second, the plurality of legal values and digital values renders value conflicts within digital jurisprudence difficult to balance. Finally, if one hastily resorts to digital methods to study law—or uses law to frame the digital world—before these two dilemmas have been clarified, cognitive bias may arise, along with the illusion of “complete knowledge.” Bias does not equate to error; rather, it reflects objective gaps produced in digital jurisprudence by factors such as the inherent ambiguity of language and the plurality of values.

Paradigm shift to address uncertainty

Uncertain knowledge materials is the cognitive starting point of digital jurisprudence. The knowledge materials apprehended by both the digital world and jurisprudence are characterized by uncertainty. The materials from which digital jurisprudence acquires knowledge consist of objectively existing entities in the digital world. The development of digital-world phenomena is non-linear and exhibits spatiotemporal diffusion effects, which further intensify uncertainty in knowledge acquisition. This necessitates constructing a cognitive pathway grounded in a paradigm of uncertainty. Even when information is abundant, uncertainty remains pervasive; when new knowledge emerges, how jurisprudence truly understands factual materials directly affects the trajectory and direction of research in digital jurisprudence.

An uncertainty-oriented epistemology is the cognitive paradigm of digital jurisprudence. In philosophical terms, uncertainty refers to the randomness and contingency that arise within the determinate operation of things. An uncertainty-oriented epistemology applies uncertainty at the level of knowledge acquisition, holding that knowledge does not arise merely from the accumulation of facts and that pure observability and objectivity do not exist.

Jurisprudence and the digital world share this epistemological orientation. Law attempts to overcome the limitations of the natural sciences and the burdens of moral culpability through the methods of the humanities. While law shares materials with the natural sciences, its method is philosophical. Along the path from factual cognition to knowledge formation, an uncertainty-oriented epistemology constitutes the background for the development of digital jurisprudence’s knowledge system, the pathway through which knowledge accumulates, and the integrative paradigm that connects legal research with the digital world. On one hand, the practical-philosophical paradigm embedded in this epistemology can effectively guide the practical dimensions of digital jurisprudence. On the other hand, an uncertainty-oriented epistemology does not imply that the acquisition of digital knowledge lacks foundations.

The logic of knowledge accumulation in digital jurisprudence should be guided by an uncertainty-oriented epistemology. As a field-specific branch of jurisprudence, digital jurisprudence must integrate factual knowledge of the digital domain with doctrinal knowledge of positive law. Moreover, because digital jurisprudence directly influences the construction of legal institutions—and such construction often has disruptive characteristics—it is all the more necessary to rely on a relatively independent discipline to organize knowledge rationally. In light of the characteristics of digital factual knowledge and the empirical knowledge of digital technologies, digital jurisprudence should uphold its requirements for stability and unity and, guided by an uncertainty-oriented epistemology, absorb and accumulate knowledge. This epistemology should serve as the pre-understanding for knowledge acquisition. The knowing subject should form evaluative cognition of both factual and empirical knowledge and consider the significance of the knowledge acquired for legal practice.

Pathways of knowledge accumulation in theoretical research

At the philosophical level, an uncertainty-oriented epistemology facilitates a shift in cognition from certainty to uncertainty and encourages digital jurisprudence to move from pure theoretical philosophy toward practical philosophy in the process of knowledge acquisition, using practice to propel cognition toward the facts themselves. Digital jurisprudence advances beyond modern jurisprudence by combining practical openness with the constraints required for systematic operation. This imposes practical demands on the field, requiring law to respond to uncertainty through value guidance, regulatory transformation, and the updating of remedial models. At the same time, governance experience accumulated in the course of these responses should be promptly incorporated into the knowledge system of digital jurisprudence so that, through bidirectional and iterative interaction, cognitive bias arising from uncertainty can be reduced and effective knowledge accumulation achieved.

Constructing dynamic regulation beyond risk classification to address emergence: Emergence is a key feature of uncertainty in the future development of digital technologies. In addressing the uncertainties that emergence may bring, digital jurisprudence has largely classified potential harms according to their severity and, on that basis, differentiated the intensity of legal obligations. This approach aligns with the global trend in which legal regulation of digital technologies has shifted from substitution-based problems toward risk-oriented governance. Admittedly, risk-classification-based regulation, grounded in typological legal thinking, can alleviate societal anxiety over unknown digital risks and enable effective governance. However, applying risk-classification regulatory models to digital technologies runs counter to emergent patterns in developmental processes. Guided by the concept of dynamic regulation, digital rule-of-law practice should move beyond static and ex post regulatory thinking, and instead classify and tier regulation according to application scenarios and dimensions of impact.

Embedding legal culture and legal values as technological variables in research: The fundamental objective of digital jurisprudence is to uphold core principles such as digital security, digital human rights, and digital justice, extending traditional rule-of-law ideals into the virtual digital society to ensure social order and fairness in the digital age and to construct a form of digital rule of law suited to digital society. In the concrete process of knowledge accumulation, the application of digital technologies must incorporate legal culture and legal values as variables. First, the traditional certainty-oriented epistemology should be transformed, with legal culture and legal values treated as important variables of uncertainty. Second, digital jurisprudence research should incorporate legal culture and legal values as subjective considerations and evaluative factors beyond technology itself. This requires digital technologies to learn from large-scale precedent data that embed legal values and legal-cultural judgments, thereby identifying values and cultures that are broadly applicable across different legal contexts.

Technological rationality of empirical research and feedback of knowledge

Applying digital technologies to empirical research in digital jurisprudence to address legal problems is a process that involves transforming legal questions into formal representations, selecting appropriate technical methods, designing required functions, and implementing them through programming. The paradigm shift in digital jurisprudence is therefore not a one-way, passive response to changes in technological systems. Instead, it requires the continual absorption of beneficial knowledge generated through the application of technological systems, thereby consolidating the feasibility guarantee for digital jurisprudence in responding to uncertainty.

The disruptive and breakthrough development and application of digital technologies have rendered many areas of digital jurisprudence amenable to quantitative analysis and provided support for knowledge acquisition in the field. Experimental science paradigms grounded in empirical cognition, theoretical science paradigms based on model induction, computational science paradigms centered on simulation, and data-intensive science paradigms driven by data retrieval and mining together form a problem-oriented research paradigm characterized by the integration and comprehensive application of diverse forms of knowledge. In this process of knowledge integration, the supporting role of digital technologies becomes increasingly evident. However, this role should not remain confined to instrumental application. It should also take into account the systemic biases between legal research and digital technologies discussed above, and engage substantively with questions of the rationality of knowledge formation, thereby providing practical support for the construction of digital jurisprudence’s knowledge system and theoretical feedback for its further development.

Wei Zihao is an assistant research fellow from the School of Law at Tsinghua University. This article has been edited and excerpted from ECUPL Journal, Issue 5, 2025.