The Changing Face of Justice: Law's Role in a Digital Society

Abstract

The diffusion of digital technologies into nearly every domain of social life has unsettled the foundational assumptions on which modern legal systems were built — territorial jurisdiction, human authorship of decisions, evidentiary permanence, and the presumption that law regulates conduct after the fact rather than architecture before it. This paper undertakes an analytical, scoping-review-informed examination of how law is being reconstituted as a regulatory, adjudicative, and normative instrument in a digital society. Using a PRISMA-ScR-informed screening process applied to an author-supplied bibliography supplemented by independently sourced legal and socio-legal literature (48 sources in total, all published in 2024 or earlier), the paper synthesises five interlocking strands of scholarship: cyberlaw foundations and the "code is law" thesis; platform governance and intermediary speech regulation; artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making and due process; data protection and informational privacy; and the digitalisation of courts and access to justice. A comparative analysis of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, the Information Technology Act 2000, and the Council of Europe's Budapest Convention is presented in tabular form to illustrate convergence and divergence in regulatory design. The paper argues that digital society has produced a triple displacement in legal ordering — from rules to code, from courts to platforms, and from human to algorithmic discretion — and that an "analytical reality exposing" reading of the literature reveals a persistent accountability gap between technological capability and legal remedy. The paper concludes that the changing face of justice is not simply digitisation of existing procedure but a structural renegotiation of where normative authority resides, and it proposes a research and policy agenda centred on explainability, jurisdictional cooperation, and algorithmic due process.