Some Speculation about Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning

Abstract

Although the computer has worked its way out of the laboratory and into common experience, lawyers have made slim progress towards finding useful computer applications.Research in artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science, has illuminated our capacity to use computers to model human thought processes.This research suggests that computer science may assist lawyers in both the study and performance of their reasoning processes.In this Article we will argue that the time has come for serious interdisciplinary work between lawyers and computer scientists to explore the computer's potential in law.Interdisciplinary work between the lawyer and the computer scientist has floundered on the misconceptions that each has of the other's discipline.As a result, no one has yet attempted computer programs incorporating complex techniques of legal reasoning.Even efforts in legal information retrieval have been hampered by these misconceptions.In retrieval, lawyers have viewed the computer as, at most, a storehouse from which cases and statutes might be retrieved by skillfully designed indexing systems.Computer scientists, on the other hand, have operated with a conception of law as a collection of facts and "correct" legal principles; they have assumed that the computer can be most helpful to the lawyer if it can retrieve the right answers quickly.But the lawyer rarely looks for, or even expects, clear answers.More often than not, he searches his data base-treatises, articles, statutes, cases, and other materials-in order to construct legally acceptable arguments in the pursuit of one or more objectives.Likewise, the computers have information processing capabilities that are overlooked in the common conceptualization of computers as information storage devices.Work in artificial intelligence has been proceeding for more than a decade on efforts to model information processing after human thought

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 139 citations exist upstream.