The project started from a colloquium hosted at Helsinki University in September 2019 (link). A group of scholars — from legal history, comparative law, civil procedure, legal theory, and history of the book — gathered to discuss a question: 

“Is the information-age challenging traditional ways of thinking about the legal past?” 

No surprise that everyone was concerned with this broad theme, but the fresh insight was in the awareness that any meaningful advancement begins from clarifying a key question focused on “information” — a word so common but at the same time so hopelessly unclear in its deeper and broader implications. What is information, and what is its relationship to other fundamental categories such as “knowledge” , and what its impact on conceiving and designing legal institutions and broadly on legal thinking? 

It is precisely the need to clarify such questions about “information” in the context of legal thinking which gave a start to this broad research-project conducted on the cusp of legal history and legal theory.