International Law

Repéré dans la dernière livraison du LEGAL EDUCATION ABSTRACTS, Vol. 5, No. 7 : Feb 21, 2008 [1], un article particulièrement touffu de Ian Gallacher, Syracuse University - College of Law, Mapping the Social Life of the Law : An Alternative Approach to Legal Research dans lequel il est notamment admis (et à mon avis presque démontré : ça fait peur) que le papier n'a plus aucun avenir dans la recherche juridique moderne.

Aussi, face à la complexité du système à venir, est-il proposé de pré-indexer les informations contenues dans les jurisprudences afin de faciliter leur citation et surtout le traitement documentaires d'icelles.

A voir au moins pour les jolis graphiques...

Mapping the Social Life of the Law : An Alternative Approach to Legal Research

IAN GALLACHER
Syracuse University - College of Law

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October 24, 2007

Abstract :
As the law moves inexorably to a digital publication model in which books no longer play a role, the problem of how to continue to make the law available to all becomes more acute. Open access initiatives already exist, and more are on the way, but all are limited by their inability to provide more than self-indexed search options for their users. Self-indexing, although a powerful alternative to the traditional pre-indexed searching made possible by systems like West's ?Key Number? digests, has inherent limitations which make it a poor choice as the sole means of researching the law. But developing a new pre-indexed legal digest would be a prohibitively expensive and complex undertaking, making it unlikely that open access legal information sites can develop and maintain a fully-implemented digesting approach to legal research. This article proposes a reconceptualization of the information already contained within most American judicial opinions in order to permit open access sites to offer a form of pre-indexed research to their users. By mapping a case's location in a graphical representation of the doctrinal development of an issue under consideration, this approach allows the court's citations to prior authority to act as a pre-indexing tool, allows the researcher to update the law by showing more recent cases that have cited to the target case, and gives the researcher the opportunity to trace network links in order to uncover connections between cases that might otherwise have been difficult to discern.

Keywords : legal research

JEL Classifications : K40

Working Paper Series

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Suggested Citation

Gallacher, Ian, "Mapping the Social Life of the Law : An Alternative Approach to Legal Research" (October 24, 2007). Available at SSRN : http://ssrn.com/abstract=1024176 http://hq.ssrn.com/Journals/ViewIss...