Extropians look to the concept of law as a powerful tool in building a better future. As with every other aspect of their own lives and society, however, they question the current state of the law and legal thinking, look for the best in the past and the present and seek to develop new modes of thinking and acting to transcend bounds that others may accept without doubt.
Individual liberty and reciprocity are the highest values in an extropian approach to law and legal issues. These values follow naturally from a desire for self transformation and a stress on social systems that arise as a spontaneous ordering of free individuals. Accordingly, extropians look to legal systems as tools for freely ordering their own lives and their interactions with others and they resist the use of law as a tool of repression or coercion.
Extropians strongly question the presumption underlying the current almost universal paradigm of law that assumes that law is inextricably intertwined with the power of the state. They seek to free the law from this confining assumption as much as possible and see the law more as a fluid ground of action for ordering the affairs of individuals on a consensual basis. Thus, extropians are interested in current developments in various regimes of so-called "privately produced law", such as private mediation and arbitration, and look forward to the possibility of expanding the reach of such regimes of private law to new areas of human activity. Many extropians think that the coercive state as we know it today could be more or less completely replaced by "polycentric legal codes" of privately produced law, an example of spontaneous order on the largest social scale.
Individual responsibility is the necessary corollary of the extropian stress on individual liberty. Thus extropians do not look to rights granted by an impersonal state, but rather the free acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of individual and collective action, coupled with reasoned and explicit reciprocity, as the best basis for ordering human (and posthuman) affairs through law.
Tolerance and personal privacy are naturally very high values in extropian legal thinking. Thus extropians believe that strong encryption and a completely free Internet are basic foundations of the world they seek to build.
Extropian legal thinkers also seek to apply the value of intelligent technology to legal systems. Concepts such as "smart contracts" exemplify the use of advanced intelligent software agents and strong cryptography to re-engineer legal systems in an era of rapid social change driven by accelerating technological evolution.
Extropian lawyers stay on the cutting edge of technology in the practice of law. They look forward to such advances as intelligent software research assistants and the use of virtual and "enhanced" reality in their offices, the courtroom and the classroom to make the practice of law a vital part of our changing world.
Extropians foresee many new challenges to the use of law as a tool for ordering the lives of free individuals. Technologies like molecular nanotechnology, neural enhancements and artificial intelligence and new social environments, such as those which are developing on the Internet and which will come to be in new environments in outer space and elsewhere all present profound questions for extropian legal thinkers. Extropians embrace these legal challenges as free individuals applying principles of rational reciprocity.