Compliance, Regtech, and Smart Legal Ecosystems: A Methodology for Legal Governance Validation

The purpose of this chapter is to present a three-step methodology that we propose to empirically validate legal governance models. More specifically the methodology can be used to validate the results of selected conditions and the interrelationship among the conditions that we propose are relevant to generate legal ecosystems. The concept, ‘legal ecosystem’, as discussed in the chapter, refers to the totality of actors operating in a governance and compliance space. A smart legal ecosystem denotes a legal ecosystem that functions in an intelligent environment (with cyber-physical systems) encompassing the features of the Internet of Things. ‘Compliance’, ‘legal compliance’, and ‘legal governance’ are defined. The chapter also briefly considers and compares the work on rules, norms and institutions of Amedeo G. Conte, John Searle, Elinor Ostrom, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, and Douglas North. Finally, the three-step methodology aims to achieve an empirical validation of legal governance regulatory models.