Recent algorithmic technologies have challenged law’s anthropocentric assumptions. In this article, we develop a set of theoretical tools drawn from new materialisms and the philosophy of information to unravel the complex intra-actions between law and computer code. Accordingly, we first propose a framework for understanding the enmeshing of law and code based on a diffractive reading of Barad’s agential realism and Simondon’s theory of information. We argue that once law and code are understood as material entities that intra-act through in-formation, the concept of transduction allows us to trace how they push each other towards change. After developing the theoretical tools, we deploy them to make sense of how law and code have changed in response to increasing automation of decision-making and the appearance of unexplainable artificial intelligence (AI) code. Thus, we employ a case study to trace transformations of the right to explanation under the European data protection regulations. This provides the backdrop for our account of how law transduces into code (and vice versa) and a proving ground for our framework.

最近的算法技术挑战了法律以人类为中心的假设。在本文中，我们开发了一套从新唯物主义和信息哲学中提取的理论工具，以揭示法律和计算机代码之间复杂的内部行为。因此，我们首先基于对巴拉德的代理现实主义和西蒙东的信息理论的衍射解读，提出了一个理解法律和代码的交织的框架。我们认为，一旦法律和法规被理解为通过信息进行内部行为的物质实体，转导的概念就可以让我们追踪它们如何相互推动变革。在开发了理论工具之后，我们部署它们是为了了解法律和代码如何随着决策自动化程度的提高和无法解释的人工智能（AI）代码的出现而发生变化。因此，我们采用案例研究来追踪欧洲数据保护法规下解释权的转变。这为我们解释法律如何转化为代码（反之亦然）提供了背景，并为我们的框架提供了试验场。