What AI Practitioners Should Know about the Law

This is Part 2 of a two-part article and discusses issues of tort liability and the use of computers in the courtroom. Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of AI Magazine, discussed steps that developers of AI systems can take to protect their efforts, and the attendant legal ambiguities that must eventually be addressed in order to clarify the scope of such protection. Part 2 explores the prospect of AI systems as subjects of litigation. Once inside the courtroom, what role can the computer assume in its own defense or in the service of some other litigant? The law of evidence, developed to govern the testimony of human witnesses, must continually evolve to accommodate new, nonhuman sources of information.