The nature of the responses to my post about
SGML, research, and hands-on drafting by attorneys surprised me.
Noting first that I never met a law librarian whom I didn't like,
I was surprised that, apparently, SGML interest was not more
widespread in the law librarian community.
Prior to my current (since 1985) incarnation as a sole practitioner, I
had been an attorney in a large Philadelphia firm, a Delaware
assistant attorney general, special counsel to Rohm and Haas Company,
an general counsel of an NYSE-listed corporation. In each of these
settings, the traditional model had the attorneys surrounded by
a choir of acolytes and fairly rigid lines between professional and
clerical tasks.
When I returned to private practice, I believed that changes in
information technology would ultimately change the way that law
was practiced. (Come to think of it, not all of the technical change
has been positive; consider, e.g., personal injury law TV commercials
and, now, program length infomercials.) Using techniques which were
being developed at Brown and elsewhere for scholarly research and
publishing, I attempted to develop a style of practice which viewed
the attorney as a hands-on scholar.
The law appeared to lend itself to this approach precisely because
its research activities are document-intensive and involve the
location, analysis, and application of precedent. The markup
approach, with appropriate hardware and software support, was
significant, where, with planning and document descriptors, little or
no clerical support was required to research, write, or produce
complex documents, simple documents, and even things normally
typed on forms such as subpoenas. (Although neither politically nor
gender correct, the quotation heading Watcom International's
Waterloo Script/GML User's guide is apt: "It is unworthy of excellent
men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation."
-- Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Since the Baron died in
1716, he was spared seeing the slavery created in our
current federal civil practice.)
The foregoing is, however, a view from the practitioner's
perspective. I had expected substantial law librarian interest
in SGML from the librarian/scholar viewpoints. With feet in the
law and what Tom Bruce of Cornell (tom@law.mail.cornell.edu) called
(in his insightful post on SGML) the "computer geek" camps, I see
SGML ultimately coming to dominate all document-based information
interchange and electronic publishing. I believe further that the
speed with which effective electronic publications enter the
law libraries is a function of librarian pressure and publisher's
resistance.
In 1987, Jim Coombs, Allen Renear, and Steve DeRose (all then here at
Brown) published "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly
Text Processing," CACM 30/11 (1987) 933-947. ISSN: 0001-0782.
Basic computer geek stuff. Fascinated by graphics and electronic
publishing, DeRose started a company.
12,000 miles away, an Aloha Airlines aircraft experiences hull
delamination and in-flight loss of fuselage skin. FAA/NTSB
investigation revealed that the update pages in the Boeing maintenance
manuals which dealt with surface inspections were either missing or
misinserted.
DeRose's company, Electronic Publishing Technologies, has developed
Boeing's current aircraft maintenance manuals and update service.
SGML-based, it provides color, graphics, hypertext, and other gongs
and whistles, electronic updating and distribution, and multiuser,
interactive access. Meanwhile, you and I are sticking pages into
Moore's Federal Practice and its kin.
Ina Schiff
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