In contemporary thought, legal system can be seen as a kind of technology suitable to shape social rules according to any design, hence laws are conceived as artifacts modelling human behaviour. In this paper I discuss such perspective analysing a phenomenon observed in the Italian legal system – laws enacted “with experimental purposes” – from a twofold perspective: general theory and philosophy of law. From the first view, after having provided a definition of “experimental laws”, I argue that they can be included in a separate theoretical category, since they are not, for example, mere provisional or temporary rules. Conversely, I claim that such kind of laws is not considered in traditional legal positivism or even in more recent perspectives such as “legal nihilism”, since “legal experimentation”, as such, can be seen as a convergence of technology and law into unifying processes of social control. In conclusion, I draw some further paths of research concerning the technological perspective of law.
