Some Speculation about Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning

JOINDER OF CLAIMS, COUNTERCLAIMS, AND CROSS-COMPLAINTS: SUGGESTED REVISION OF THE CALIFORNIA PROVISIONS. Research in artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science, has illuminated our capacity to use computers to model human thought processes. In this Article we will argue that the time has come for serious interdisciplinary work between lawyers and computer scientists to explore the computer's potential in law. Interdisciplinary work between the lawyer and the computer scientist has floundered on the misconceptions that each has of the other's discipline. As a result, no one has yet attempted computer programs incorporating complex techniques of legal reasoning. Even efforts in legal information retrieval have been hampered by these misconceptions. In retrieval, lawyers have viewed the computer as, at most, a storehouse from which cases and statutes might be retrieved by skillfully designed indexing systems. But the lawyer rarely looks for, or even expects, clear answers. So far, the efforts in legal retrieval have given little consideration to the possibility that computers might operate on the legal data base the way a lawyer does. Yet the work in both fields law and computer science -,suggests that the computer modeling of legal reasoning would be a fruitful area for research. In this Article we speculate about the dimensions and possible directions of this research. Under the most promising of outcomes, interdisciplinary research could lead both to a greater understanding of the legal reasoning process and to the design of machine methods for performing parts of it. The prospect of using computers to model legal reasoning processes is likely to prompt a typically lawyer-like response: So what if we understand legal reasoning or legal argument formation better? Knowing more about the ways in which lawyers search and manipulate the legal data base might lead to improving the lawyer's skill at his work. We recognize the possibility that the work of many lawyers might actually involve little use of the legal data base for argument construction or dispute resolution.