The rise and fall of the legal expert system

tags

Philip Leith Expert Systems

Notes

the rise of expert systems and why - despite their failure - the appeal of commoditising legal expertise continues to allure the unwary.

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easily replicated, readily distributed, and essentially immortal

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law was being more difficult to manipulate into an ‘expert system’ format than the early researchers believed

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my position became much more sceptical of the value of expert systems in law

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notion of being able to formalise knowledge through some logical or semi-logical formalism

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simplistic rule-oriented view of law of the sort promoted by Hart

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culture in law of denying the complexity of law

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A school of programming had developed around Robert Kowalski at Imperial College based on the language Prolog (programming in logic), which was being heavily promoted as ‘the language of the future’, and many appeared to be persuaded

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the intellectual and funding bubbles were burst and logic programming was no longer seen as a formalism capable of living up to its hype, as Kowalski at last appeared to accept by 2001

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If LP were as good as we believed, it would have occu- pied the position that Java occupies today.

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There is only one language suitable for representing information - whether declarative or procedural - and that is first-order predicate logic. There is only one intelligent way to process information - and that is by applying deductive inference methods. (Kowalski 1980)

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propelled by the underlying interest in legal information

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wondering what legal research lawyers actually do [Much less than one would imagine - procedural knowledge was prized much more highly, we found]

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The model is thus of a core of rules, and a logical interpreter

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was partly hubristic but is also a relatively accurate description of the non-critical perspectives around law schools during that decade

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Law could be made democratically available to all and hence the research goal - it seemed to me - was almost advocated as something that was socially valuable

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commodification was in the background

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critical analysis of a system which is proposed as a ‘working legal expert system’ will quickly find that the system is not used, over promoted, and generally not much different from a list of boxes to tick.

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hubris of the 1980s was linked to a view of law which has gone, both from law schools and, to an extent, from the profession.

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why was there optimism, was there ever any success, and - if as I suggest - there was none, then why was such a huge extravaganza of funding

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focus on the machine rather than the user had led technicians into fields which they little understood

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went unused

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many hundreds of programs which have been produced as ‘expert systems’ and which grew from the opti- mism created by these three programs, Mycin, Dendral and Prospector.

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these programs were not successful in their move from the labs

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simply categorized previous efforts as learning experiences

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serious misunder- standings about logic itself, primary of which was their use that counterfactuals could rep- resent legal causation

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we have a piece of legislation which must be interpreted in the real world in a social context being gutted and represented by a formalism which other logicians believe to be incorrectly interpreted, without any discussion by the logic programmers of why they have chosen these tools and why their logical interpretation is correct.

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not logic per se, but a kind of cognitive psychology of reasoning

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Logic programming was psychology dressed up as logic - psychology dressed up as a means to handle information.

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little attempt to really under- stand how law operated or was interpreted, and the use of logic programming was more an attempt to promote a specific view of logic (as ‘reasoning’) than solve real problems in pro- ducing systems to support lawyer’s working life

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What was missing was proper analysis of user needs

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ability of experts to decide how they wished to carry out their tasks - if the tool was not directly helpful to how they wished to work, then it would simply not be used

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The difficult parts did not appear to be technical law, and indeed Carlen’s classic study of the Magistrates court appears to suggest that the real purpose of these courts is not the formal handling of legal points, but social control.

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One of the assumptions about law which was evidenced by the expert systems movement was that there was a core meaning to law - something that could be found and formalised.

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Lawyers see that substantive law is only one small part of the tool kit which they require in order to act for clients

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procedural knowledge was viewed as more useful and thus better regarded than substantive law - because procedural knowledge told you how to do something, which means that client’s wishes can be moved along

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where law is important is where there are two sides prepared to argue, rather than agree the law

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the expert knowledge which lawyers have is of a different sort to that which the expert systems designers were promoting as the knowledge base

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Law is agonistic

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law is ever changing and constantly being interpreted

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Can one really imagine two users of expert systems going into the courtroom and waiving their respective printouts at the judge, claiming that theirs states that they should win?

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simple ‘decision tree’

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distant relative of the idea of an ‘expert system’

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One should never underestimate the power of an attractive idea - that we can anthropomorphize the machine: have it ‘reason’, ‘think’ or whatnot. That was what really underlay the notion of expert system

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we can see why industry was less than excited about producing products from Alvey funded research - it did not answer the needs of the marketplace

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producing such systems was attractive to the academic IT community

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lack of critical perspective on the nature of law

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massive influx of funding

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developments such as legal search engines, citations systems, etc

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expert systems movement effectively killed off any other approach to computer application to law and we are still suffering the consequences of that hubris

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