Soft law and hard law are externally-held consensus mechanisms for governing collectives. Sociocultural norms and capital-C-culture are perhaps the internally-held consensus mechanisms for governing individuals.

Soft law was never meant to be a permanent solution. Treating it as one, and letting the sandcastle stand in for the skyscraper indefinitely, is how we end up with a decade of voluntary commitments and no enforceable accountability to show for it. Soft law fosters industry cooperation, builds technical capacity among regulators, and creates the policy windows from which hard laws eventually emerge and hold actors responsible. But soft law is meant to be the foundation that eventually builds up to hard law, and this transition doesn’t happen naturally. The switch only works if the pipeline is built with the intention of bridging the two forms of regulation in mind, and the triggering mechanism of internal government policy levers is carefully designed and pulled.

How AI’s Soft Law Sandcastles Can Become Hard Law Skyscrapers ↗