http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-977485.mp3
Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Professor Seth Chandler of the University of Houston examines how computer technology is poised to change how legislation is written and applied.
Seth Chandler is a professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center where he is pioneering the use of the Mathematica computer language in the economic analysis of law. Before joining the University of Houston faculty, Professor Chandler practiced law in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. He earned his undergraduate degree at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Professor Seth Chandler - The Law and Technology
The computer has opened up new vistas in physics, medicine and other fields. But what about law?
My $500 IPad is more powerful than the fastest computer in the world when I started practice in the mid 1980s. Moreover, we now have a growing minority of law students raised on pervasive computation and who have backgrounds in engineering, science, computer science and other fields who have the zest to harness this new technology.
We can start to deploy this powerful combination by drafting easier-to-understand laws. Many statutes are thousands of pages long with innumerable cross references. The computer can find commonly used phrases - collocations -- in the statute and see if they are properly defined. If the cross-references make a network diagram of the statute look like a bowl of spaghetti, the computer can show how the law might be refactored and reconceptualized.
Consider legal research. For years, lawyers have spent ever-more-expensive hours pouring through the millions of American cases and statutes to find those resembling client's problem. And getting to the point whether that search is somewhat efficient has required years of ever-more-expensive training. But if Watson can now answer Jeopardy questions better than Ken Jennings, perhaps the computer of the future will be able to approximate answers to my kids legal questions better than most downtown law firms.
To be sure, the law and the process of lawyering are rich with nuances that will prevent computers from entirely displacing humans during my lifetime. But the future of law may belong as much to the developer of good algorithms as it does to the person who can write a good brief.