In November 2025, Professor Li Sheng from the School of Law at Ocean University of China (OUC) published a paper entitled “Shaping of the Forms of Legal Norms by Information Capacity” in Issue 6 (2025) of the Chinese Journal of Law, a leading law journal in China. Focusing on information capacity, the article systematically analyzes the evolutionary logic of forms of legal norms and argues that their formation and development are profoundly shaped by a society’s information capacity.
As societies transition from traditional to modern forms, the expansion of social scale and the increasing defamiliarization among social members necessitate the development of legal forms centered on generalized rules. By providing stable behavioral expectations for social actors under conditions of information limitation, such rules have become a core feature of the modern rule of law. The inherent tensions between generalized rules and concrete contexts of everyday life give rise to the differentiation between “rules” and “standards”. In essence, this differentiation functions as a resource-allocation strategy based on information capacity, balancing the costs and efficiency of information processing in legislation, administration of justice, and legal compliance.
With the advent and advancement of the information technology revolution, society’s overall information capacity has been significantly enhanced, equipping legal systems with the capability to process information at an unprecedented level of granularity. This opens up possibilities for constructing new forms of personalized rules. Such personalization relies on big data and AI technologies to track individual behavior continuously over time and make probabilistic predictions. It enables the law to achieve a dynamic adaptation through a rating system, making legal interventions more precise. In this way, personalized rules are expected to transcend the traditional dualistic framework of “rules versus standards” at a higher level.
By clarifying the intrinsic relationship between information capacity and the forms of legal norms, this study provides a new theoretical framework for understanding legal transformation in the intelligent era. It also provides crucial academic support for developing an independent knowledge system in the field of cyber and information law, guiding the practice of the rule of law in the information society, and facilitating a better grasp of the direction of legal evolution in response to social needs under conditions of rapid technological change.
