Abstract: This article offers an historical, theoretical and practical perspective on law as an information technology. Law fundamentally concerns information — providing information to the community about the content of legal norms and, at least in its common law form, eliciting information about the world from the disputes before a court. The article first surveys law’s history as an information technology and shows how law is changed by the information technology of its day. The article then applies information theory to understand how the computer — the key technology of our day — is changing legal search and thereby the efficient form of law. Information theory focuses on the signal to noise ratio of communication. The key to progress in creating a better computerized legal search engine is to reduce the signal to noise ratio in the link between the user and the search engine. As this ratio decreases, we show that legal search translates the uncompressed form of legal information into an algorithm for predicting what the law will be in a particular situation.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 5
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