I think the interesting question is not what will happen to
computer-assisted legal research in the year 2000, but rather what will
happen to legal research generally. A technological optimist might equate
the two, with all of the best and most effective developments happening in
that arena. That may be the case, but for the foreseeable future I see
CALR as being a conservative influence, likely to delay valuable changes.
The real problem in legal research is that the Anglo-American case law
system has produced more authority than anyone can reasonably deal with.
Legal research has consumed more time and money than any other document
retrieval problem. There are only two solutions--bring the great mass of
material under bibliographical control, or reduce the mass.
Attempts at the first solution have a long history. To mention a few: The
National Reporter System, The West Key Number System, Corpus Juris, and
LEXIS. Each of these innovations, in its day, was thought to be the answer
to the case-finding problem, the "silver bullet" that would finally bring
the body of case law under bibliographic control. And each has made a
positive contribution to the problem, but has failed in its larger
goals--sooner or later it becomes apparent that the problem is too large to
be solved by today's technology.
But hope springs eternal, and so the main thrust of current efforts is to
apply more and more sophisticated technological fixes. We have persuaded
ourselves that even though today's technology has failed, tomorrow's will
finally solve the problem. And there certainly are appealing things to
try. I'm in the process of writing a dissertation that lays out the
conceptual design for a system that can be expected to perform much better
than the existing ones (which isn't all that hard). So whether they use my
system or someone else's, we can look forward to many years of change, and
undoubtedly some significant gains.
But in my opinion, the only real hope of rationalizing the process of legal
research is to change the problem. Instead of asking how we can bring the
great mass of information under bibliographical control, we ought to be
asking how we can reduce the problem to manageable proportions. We need to
find some principled way of ignoring most of our legal authority.
This solution, too, has a long and reputable history. To mention a few
high points: the codification movement, selective case reporting, American
Jurisprudence, and the Restatements of the Law. But the legal profession
is profoundly uneasy with the idea of letting go of any of its literature,
and so while the problem appears to be solvable, even if unsolved, these
attempts at selective weeding of the literature have had just the opposite
effect--the enlarge and complicate the literature rather than reduce it.
By the year 2000, we should be well into a new generation of CALR (based, I
hope, on my approach). But in the long run there is no reason to suppose
that technology will ever solve the case-finding problem. Perhaps someday
we will get to work on the more painful process of changing the problem.
Dan Dabney
UCLA GSLIS
iasedpd@mvs.oac.ucla.edu
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