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From: ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <3495@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 5 Nov 88 18:33:57 GMT
References: <1147@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> <1218@atari.UUCP>
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Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
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In article <1218@atari.UUCP> danscott@atari.UUCP (Dan Scott) writes:
>in article <1147@xn.LL.MIT.EDU>, olsen@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Jim Olsen) says:
>
>> Imagine the value to those law students of having, for modest cost,
>> the entire United States Code, Code of Federal Regulations, or United
>> States Reports (Supreme Court decisions) in their shirt pockets!
>
>I would have to agree.  I usually take what a lawyer tells me with a
>grain of salt, but perhaps I would have more faith if I knew he had access to
>all cases that set president for what I am dealing with.
>
>Dan

More fun yet would be an expert system that would scarf through the legal
database looking for precedents relating to your current case, tie them
together into an easily-understood argument for your review, and not cost an
arm and a leg for each user. If laws are in any sense rational and analogies
between earlier and current cases hold any water, this should be possible in
principle. 

The extremely important thing to note is that this technology, once
developed, should not be privately owned but freely available to prosecutors
and defendents alike, as each citizen should be entitled to equal access to
the body of information that constitutes "the law", in practice as well as
theory. As this is most definitely _not_ the case now, and a great many
lawyers profit mightily under the present situation, chances are better than
even that legal AI would be made illegal--except for use by "qualified
professionals"...

-- 
Nicholas Spies			ns@cat.cmu.edu.arpa
Center for Design of Educational Computing
Carnegie Mellon University