Building proactive law competence with systems intelligence

Proactive law focuses on preventing future problems and promoting desirable outcomes through the application of law. This article argues that framing proactive law as a systemic approach opens up the possibility for developing a proactive legal theory and solutions using insights from various applications of systems thinking, which is an aspect currently missing from proactive law research. The article introduces the framework of systems intelligence (SI), a practically oriented philosophy for making positive systemic interventions, and discusses its promises and challenges in building proactive law competence. The SI framework is used to illustrate how formalistic, legal-centric and problem-focused practices of law tend to create systemic “reactive-law generators” that may contribute to reproducing the problems they were initially designed to solve. The paper argues that understanding the mechanisms of the reactive-law generators and mitigating their negative effects should be the focus of proactive law research and suggests that systems intelligence philosophy, as well as other systems-awareness building methods, such as visual and co-creative design techniques, can provide strategies and tools to support this work.