6 ms·

> It probably belongs to a fuzzy set of existing situations canvassed by cases raised in the past thousand years. Computers own those. Don't write off expert s

by hooande 14y ago

> It probably belongs to a fuzzy set of existing situations canvassed by cases raised in the past thousand years. Computers own those. Don't write off expert systems because you can't see how you would implement it right now. It would take an unprecedented effort (like apollo mission sized), but we have the means to build legal expert systems available to us today. It's not being done because it wouldn't be immediately profitable, in part due to the bias you expressed. For every judge with a truly unique case on their docket right now, there are a thousand other judges with wholly predictable and commonplace cases. The law is incredibly complex, but 80% cases don't require any one-of-a-kind judgement. Humans are actually highly predicable in large numbers (just ask Nate Silver). The idea of using the technology behind IBM's Watson is Hackers level laughable (though I think that was chosen because it's well known). The right tools for this job do exist, the billion dollar problem is getting the right input.

jacques_chester 14y ago
I want to believe it can be done in a single, gigantic project. It won't happen that way. What will happen is that special purpose systems will nibble at the core of relatively well-settled areas of law. Trusts. Contracts. The bread-and-butter stuff. Most such disputes never reach the court, because the particular law is so well settled. Party A goes to their lawyer, who can confidently say whether or not they would win in the courts against B. That's the beauty of stare decisis, in the long run it drives down the amount of court time needed for civil disputes. But: 1. Some people still want their day in court. As a lawyer you are obliged to give your client your utmost efforts, even if they are idiots without a legal leg to stand on. I imagine a lot of them will demand human judgement be used. 2. Hard cases still come up. All the time. More frequently than you imagine. To the point where the Supreme and High Courts of the world turn away far more tricky corner cases than they address.
- shasta 14y ago
  Whether and how it will happen is a different question from whether it could and should happen. Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. One of the main reasons that hard cases frequently come up is because the law is, in software terms, extremely buggy. Those "corner cases" are mainly a problem because the law attempts to solve so many problems by partitioning into ad hoc cases. The law (meaning the courts and the legislative process, as well) is so completely broken that it's hard to imagine a fix actually happening in the US.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    > Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. Lawyers already do this. The world is still too complex to reduce to a single, central set of uniform principles. Instead you have lots of little pockets of temporary uniformity. What happens is: 1. Lots of disconnected cases. 2. One day, a lawyer or judge notices a pattern. 3. A new principle is expounded in a case. 4. Other judges might pick it up and it becomes the common law. Or they don't, and it doesn't. 5. If it's widely accepted, the new principle begins to accrete exceptions, odd outliers, dusty corners and so on. 6. One day, a lawyer or judge notices a pattern ... You need to stop thinking of law as a product and think of it as a process. It is not a static, manufactured good. It is a procedure for discovery.
    - shasta 14y ago
      >> Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. >Lawyers already do this. I'm not really sure what you mean by this, but how lawyers think about things is not really relevant to legal outcomes. Also, none of the lawyers I know employ anything like the reasoning I have in mind in their work. Finally, if your claim is that the outcomes produced by our byzantine legal system is equivalent to the outcomes that would be produced by a principled approach, then I think you are mistaken. > You need to stop thinking of law as a product and think of it as a process. You need to stop assuming that you know what I think :). I don't think it should be static. The law acts to model aspects of the world that society feels should relevant to legal outcomes. The world is far too complicated for that model to be perfect, in my preferred system or yours. So, of course, we will occasionally notice aspects of our world that are not modeled and deserve to be, and there should be a procedure for doing as much. There are many problem with the process we have in place. First, there aren't clean principles to begin with. The courts are tasked with ruling on the written law, which is highly imperfect. To the extent that the courts "discover" new principles out of the written law, they are effectively writing new law, which in theory isn't their job. Second, the principles should come before the outcomes. In your flow chart, the outcomes are decided first in a large body of cases and then eventually the pattern is recognized. But the whole point of a principled approach is to improve the quality of outcomes, not just to simplify the description of the poor outcomes that would have been arrived at by judges thinking hard about it. In general, I think you greatly overestimate the number of principles that would be necessary, in the right framework, to improve the legal system. But I recognize that the onus is on me to back that up and I'm not really in a position to propose a specific alternative system.

by hooande 14y ago

jacques_chester 14y ago

I want to believe it can be done in a single, gigantic project. It won't happen that way. What will happen is that special purpose systems will nibble at the core of relatively well-settled areas of law. Trusts. Contracts. The bread-and-butter stuff. Most such disputes never reach the court, because the particular law is so well settled. Party A goes to their lawyer, who can confidently say whether or not they would win in the courts against B. That's the beauty of stare decisis, in the long run it drives down the amount of court time needed for civil disputes. But: 1. Some people still want their day in court. As a lawyer you are obliged to give your client your utmost efforts, even if they are idiots without a legal leg to stand on. I imagine a lot of them will demand human judgement be used. 2. Hard cases still come up. All the time. More frequently than you imagine. To the point where the Supreme and High Courts of the world turn away far more tricky corner cases than they address.

shasta 14y ago
Whether and how it will happen is a different question from whether it could and should happen. Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. One of the main reasons that hard cases frequently come up is because the law is, in software terms, extremely buggy. Those "corner cases" are mainly a problem because the law attempts to solve so many problems by partitioning into ad hoc cases. The law (meaning the courts and the legislative process, as well) is so completely broken that it's hard to imagine a fix actually happening in the US.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. Lawyers already do this. The world is still too complex to reduce to a single, central set of uniform principles. Instead you have lots of little pockets of temporary uniformity. What happens is: 1. Lots of disconnected cases. 2. One day, a lawyer or judge notices a pattern. 3. A new principle is expounded in a case. 4. Other judges might pick it up and it becomes the common law. Or they don't, and it doesn't. 5. If it's widely accepted, the new principle begins to accrete exceptions, odd outliers, dusty corners and so on. 6. One day, a lawyer or judge notices a pattern ... You need to stop thinking of law as a product and think of it as a process. It is not a static, manufactured good. It is a procedure for discovery.
  - shasta 14y ago
    >> Most legal rules could be vastly improved by reducing them to principles that are combined in a framework of cost/benefit analysis. >Lawyers already do this. I'm not really sure what you mean by this, but how lawyers think about things is not really relevant to legal outcomes. Also, none of the lawyers I know employ anything like the reasoning I have in mind in their work. Finally, if your claim is that the outcomes produced by our byzantine legal system is equivalent to the outcomes that would be produced by a principled approach, then I think you are mistaken. > You need to stop thinking of law as a product and think of it as a process. You need to stop assuming that you know what I think :). I don't think it should be static. The law acts to model aspects of the world that society feels should relevant to legal outcomes. The world is far too complicated for that model to be perfect, in my preferred system or yours. So, of course, we will occasionally notice aspects of our world that are not modeled and deserve to be, and there should be a procedure for doing as much. There are many problem with the process we have in place. First, there aren't clean principles to begin with. The courts are tasked with ruling on the written law, which is highly imperfect. To the extent that the courts "discover" new principles out of the written law, they are effectively writing new law, which in theory isn't their job. Second, the principles should come before the outcomes. In your flow chart, the outcomes are decided first in a large body of cases and then eventually the pattern is recognized. But the whole point of a principled approach is to improve the quality of outcomes, not just to simplify the description of the poor outcomes that would have been arrived at by judges thinking hard about it. In general, I think you greatly overestimate the number of principles that would be necessary, in the right framework, to improve the legal system. But I recognize that the onus is on me to back that up and I'm not really in a position to propose a specific alternative system.