The regulation of technology, including artificial intelligence and other autonomous systems, increasingly takes place through hybrid governance regimes where formal law intersects with technical standards, organisational policies, and professional norms. Implementing these overlapping normative requirements depends to a significant extent on actors within the tech community, especially software developers and engineers expected to build compliant systems. Yet we know comparatively little about how these actors encounter, interpret and engage with legal norms in everyday technical practice. Our paper introduces legal consciousness as a lens for analysing this problem and develops a conceptual and analytical framework for empirical research on the tech community. Drawing on legal consciousness and legal pluralism, the framework identifies legal dilemmas as empirical entry points and links them to narratives of law, knowledge pathways, and resulting patterns of action. It also distinguishes multiple levels of analysis and allows researchers to examine how legal meaning varies across professional subcommunities, organisations, regulatory fields, and over time. The framework is intended to support systematic empirical investigation of how legal norms are interpreted, negotiated, delegated, resisted, and translated into technical practice.
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Kelemen et al. (2026) studied this question.
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