Perez critiques Findlay's metaverse governance: law and code are not separate realms

A new review essay by Oren Perez takes on Mark Findlay's ambitious 2025 book *Governing the Metaverse: Law, Order and Freedom in Digital Space*. While Findlay correctly identifies the metaverse as a social and imaginative space needing freedom and community, Perez argues the book's core categories—'the metaverse' and 'new law'—are insufficiently theorized. Findlay relies on a realspace/virtual distinction that his own analysis destabilizes, given that digital environments are inseparable from physical data centers, platform architectures, and real-world harms. Perez contends the governance problem is not about devising a separate law for a separate virtual realm, but about governing a hybrid socio-technical order where code, platform rules, and legal oversight recursively interact without any single level exercising decisive control.

To address this architecture, Perez draws on algorithmic constitutionalism, speech-act pluralism, and what he calls 'fuzzy legality.' He suggests that jurisprudence must evolve to reason about normative force that is layered, defeasible, and recursively unstable. In short, the metaverse is not a place apart—it is deeply embedded in existing legal and technical systems. The essay, forthcoming in the *Journal of Law & Society* (2026), pushes the debate from utopian or dystopian visions of digital space toward a pragmatic, multi-layered governance model that even AI platforms and regulators must reckon with.