In the last chapter, the Doctor emerged as a myth-ideal for the lawyer-node of the West. The Doctor embodies what is at stake for the being that, through its immersion with the law network, engages with the primal materials of time and death with the potential to be responsible for becoming. The Doctor's alien safeguarding of becoming – his responsibility made manifest through memory, technical doing, and holding off – demarks the possibilities for technical lawyering within the triumph of technology.

Lawyer-nodes are but one intersection within the networks of the present. The networks produce other node locations, presenting other complex, hybrid, changing beings, other points of difference. Even the law network integrates with other networks to generate other beings – beings that conventionally bear the titles ‘judges’, ‘plaintiff’, ‘inmates’, ‘clerk’, ‘law students’, and ‘law professors’. It is the last cyborg that is the focus of this chapter. With the triumph of technology, what is the point, the end for legal scholarship? As witnessed in Chapter 3, Heidegger's account of technology's occupation of the Western intellectual horizon in modernity led to his assessment of the end of thinking and the end of genuine scholarship. Like his wider story on the totality of technology, this fall also generates a romantic desire for an imagined past of true intellectual endeavour, and a devaluing of the technicity of modern research life. Indeed, with great scorn, Heidegger condemns ‘research man who does not have a library at home’.

Heidegger's quaint criticisms need updating. It is not so much that research woman of the legal academies does not have a home library; it is that she is interfacing with clouds of libraries and repositories through her smart device while in a committee meeting, on public transport, late at night once the children are in bed. Through caresses on a touch-sensitive screen, contemporary scholars of the West are able to access, connect, and process data in fast and different ways, independent of the old institutions of the paper archive. The fundamental question concerns the end to which this technical capacity should be deployed. How can scholars – particularly legal scholars – be responsible for becoming?