Cornell University Law School Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository Cornell Law Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 2004 Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law James Grimmelmann Cornell Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub Part of the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation James Grimmelmann, "Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law," 49 New York Law School Law Review 147 (2004) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. VIRTUAL WORLDS AS COMPARATIVE LAW JAMES GRiMMELMANN* I. INTRODUCTION One way of talking about virtual worlds' and law is to talk about the laws that might be applied to such worlds. This was the approach taken by many presenters at the State of Play confer- ence. 2 In various combinations, they discussed possible sources of legal control over virtual world game spaces and reasons to support or oppose such legal control. I intend to do something different. For purposes of this Arti- cle, I would like to take seriously the claims of virtual world games to be genuinely new societies, at least for awhile. Societies have laws, so why should virtual societies be any different? My topic, then, will not be the law of virtual worlds, but rather law in virtual worlds. If lawyers can learn from studying the legal systems of com- mon law and civil law countries, 3 perhaps we can also learn from studying the legal systems of virtual law worlds.