ALICE in Cyberland: Computer Support for Lawyers in a Global Economy

An often-quoted bonmot identifies the PC as an ideal solution - once we found the problem it is the solution for. The same could be said with some justification about AI and Law. Legal expert systems should be the ideal tool to solve all sorts of problems of the criminal and civil justice system - if we would only know which ones. The hopes of `strong AI', the replacement of legal experts in their field of expertise, has been unsuccessful so far - with the exception of some highly specialised applications for those field of law which traditionally rely heavily on mathematical calculations, such as tax and social security law. As a consequence, research in AI tried to identify useful applications where the human competitor is for one reason or the other not a highly trained expert in the field herself. Two avenues in particular were explored: the use of intelligent tutoring programmes for legal education and decision support in knowledge intensive situations. Here a lawyer needs rapid access to extra-legal information, or information about a field of law for which she is not an expert. In both situations, the user is also a learner, the computer's primary function becomes one of making the user more informed and competitive, not to replace her. From a `doer', the computer becomes a `teacher'. However, the original strategy to make theses systems as competent in their mastery of legal knowledge continued, and lack of proper understanding of the legal reasoning process is still quoted as the most significant obstacle for successful legal AI. (see e.g,. Aikenhead 2000). And most of the technical refinements proposed still see it as their main task to model more accurately the legal reasoning process, and the main arguments for or against a specific logic (e.g. default logic vs. predicate circumscription) are their similarity to the process of legal argumentation (see e.g. Haage 1997). Short, the focus in legal AI research continues to be on the system, not the user side. This is in a way understandable enough, after all, it is the unquestioned dogma of higher education that the best experts in the field are also the most appropriate teachers. Learning is imitating from the best.

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