SRE in the Law of Technological Risk: Reliability and responsibility

This paper examines how automated digital infrastructures reshape legal understandings of responsibility, as continuous deployment, data-driven adaptation and distributed architectures render failure a routine feature of system behaviour. Traditional supervisory models, largely based on documentation and ex post review, face increasing difficulty in capturing risks that emerge at the operational level. The study argues that effective oversight requires a degree of technical literacy within legal institutions, enabling them to interpret system behaviour through logs, metrics and observable practices. Drawing on Site Reliability Engineering, it highlights the relevance of structured monitoring, error budgets, traceable data governance and post-incident analysis as tools for assessing diligence. These elements are considered alongside emerging regulatory approaches, including algorithmic audits, impact assessments and risk-based supervision. Reliability is framed not as the absence of failure but as an organisational practice grounded in anticipation, documentation and response. Legal accountability in automated environments thus depends on institutions capable of recognising, recording and learning from system deviations over time. Note: Version updated in repository for preservation and digital accessibility. Original intellectual content remains unchanged. Generative AI tools were used solely for translation and linguistic refinement. No AI tools were involved in the conception or substantive development. The final text was reviewed and approved by the author. Official reference version:Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17363577Parallel version available:SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5613230 - DOI: https://10.2139/ssrn.5613230Preservation copy at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/zenodo.17363577