Legal Research

The History of Computer-Assisted Legal Research

By Simon Chester

Here’s a link to a first chapter by the Advanced Legal Research instructors at Stanford Law School in a work on the history of CALR. I suspect they need to get into the stacks more

It’s interesting as far as it goes, but it doesn’t capture as much of the early detail as Jon Bing’s Handbook of Legal Information Retrieval. Jon’s book led me to Louis O. Kelso’s Does the Law Need a Technological Revolution in 18 Rocky Mntn. L. Rev. 388 (1945-1946) - yes 1946. It discusses the application of computers to the task of legal research.

The lawyer will be freed to do his distinctively legal tasks.

Thus freed from the insuperable burden of plodding from library to library, refreshing his recollection upon index systems of various books, pulling them out and ploughing through them, and then making laborious niotes in longhand, the lawyer can devote his time and mind to the social, political, and economic aspects of law and justice. No longer will the true value of his wisdom be lost to society. No longer will courts hand down unintentionally conflicting decisions.’ No longer need lawyers give
erroneous advice to clients and cause loss to them. No longer will legislators unwittingly confuse the law.

Were the time available, it would be interesting to speculate upon the economic effects of these vitally necessary, and therefore inevitable, developments, but this can await the time of arrival of the “legal industrial revolution.”

Today the lawyer works substantially as he worked before the industrial revolution. Only [CALR] will save him from plying one of the most confused, ill-paid, and unsatisfactory professions in the
world of tomorrow.

And while we’re here in the stacks, a link to Graham Greenleaf’s descant on Jon’s work.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 14, 2009 (boomark / email).