About the Book

Franklin. Hobbes. Jefferson. Aristotle. All were known as political thinkers. But all were scientific thinkers too. There was a time when the people who thought about how to build things and the people who thought about how to govern were the same. They understood that construction and governance were one project.

Then we specialized. Government is filled with lawyers and policy makers who know little of engineering. Engineering curriculums have little space for law or political science. Building with Law is about what this has cost us, and how to get some of it back.

Law need not be understood as a constraint on what engineers build — at least no more than the tensile strength of steel or the computational cost of a sorting algorithm. The book treats the state, law, and regulation as built systems, designed and maintained, with known limits and predictable failure modes. It asks both how understanding legal systems can benefit engineers, and also how an engineering perspective can improve those legal systems.

This book is written first for engineers and engineering students, though the lens is not theirs alone. The state and the law are built systems that govern other built systems. If you build things for a living, you should understand the systems that govern what you build.

It will interest readers of Abundance, Recoding America, and Why Nothing Works — anyone trying to understand why capable societies find it so hard to build. It is also written to serve as a primary text in engineering ethics courses, as an introductory text in PPE and PPEL programs, and in technology policy seminars.

By Justin (Gus) Hurwitz  ·  Read the introduction