Digital Innovation, Legal Reform, and Social Justice: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law, Technology, and Human Rights

Abstract

Digital innovation has become a transformative force reshaping legal systems, governance structures, and the realization of human rights across the globe. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital platforms, algorithmic governance, and big data have accelerated legal reform while simultaneously generating new risks of inequality, surveillance, and unaccountable power. This article examines the intersection of digital innovation, legal reform, and social justice through an interdisciplinary legal framework that integrates doctrinal analysis with human rights theory, political economy, and ethical inquiry. Using a qualitative normative methodology based on secondary legal and scholarly sources, the study analyzes how contemporary legal reforms respond to digital transformation and whether they effectively protect human dignity, equality, and accountability. The findings reveal that while digital technologies expand access to information and justice for some groups, they simultaneously intensify structural exclusion, algorithmic discrimination, labor precarity, and transnational regulatory fragmentation. The study further demonstrates that law alone is insufficient to regulate digital power without ethical grounding, social policy integration, and global legal coordination. It concludes that without a justice-centered regulatory approach, digital reform risks producing technocratic authoritarianism rather than inclusive legal modernization. The article ultimately argues for a human rights–anchored, interdisciplinary model of digital governance that places social justice, accountability, and human dignity at the core of future legal reform.