Virtual reality is already reshaping the way we interact with the world. Is the law ready for that shift?

Law professors Mark Lemley of Stanford and Eugene Volokh of UCLA explore some of the issues in an intriguing paper “Law, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.” Written last year, the paper is about to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and came on my radar with a tweet from Lemley.

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The authors say they reacted to the Pokemon Go craze of 2016 by asking “Just imagine how many potential legal questions this raises!” They distinguish between “new takes on classic legal questions” and more novel controversies based on interactions that occur not in a physical jurisdiction, but in “private spaces with private rules.”

As Lemley and Volokh write: “[It] won’t be long before more and more of our interactions occur in virtual rather than real space (especially as avatars become realistic enough, and begin to reliably track user facial expressions): Work, training, sales, social life, education, exercise, even psychotherapy: VR will affect all these and more.”