Philip Leith

Those very few of us who were critical of the rise of legal expert systems in the early 1980s probably wonder, in idle moments, whether there is a possibility of 1 School of Law, Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, rejuvenation of an approach which was once multi-various and is now obscure and esoteric. Is it possible that after rising and falling, that legal expert system research programme could rise again? What were the conditions which gave impetus to the field and could they be repeated? In this article I want to return, with a personal viewpoint, on the rise of expert systems and why – despite their failure – the appeal of commoditising legal expertise continues to allure the unwary.

ABSTRACT Philip Leith, who is a trustee of BAILII, explains its origins in the Society for Computers and Law's suggestion that the government should build a computerised database of English law, to its role today as a major free resource for legal information. He discusses the Australian model, AustLII; describes the current database and considers the interaction between legal publishers and addedvalue and free legal sources both now and in the future.

If 'computing and law' as a discipline is to push forward and develop, it will do so best within the context of the law school rather than as a joint enterprise between law and other disciplines. It is in the law school that the understanding of the nature of law is at its height. Yet there are problems here-law schools have a strained relationship with technology and their concept of the breadth of 'legal scholarship' can be limited by conventional (or ideologically-biased) views of law and an undergraduate-oriented view of the law school's purpose. There are also problems arising from the nature of communications between lawyers and computer scientists. In this article, I highlight these problems and also argue for a more developed and extended view of legal scholarship which will be able to incorporate study and research of the impact of the computer upon legal society as well as the legal control of the unwanted elements arising from these new technologies. Most writings on IT and the law school concentrate upon its use as an educational tool. My interest here is not so much in this side of things, but in the research culture of the law school. Whilst there is sometimes a view that the linkage of law school and IT is purely related to the use of technology in legal education, the remit is wider and includes the understanding of the link between substantive law and the context of the new computerized world and also the impact of the computer in the practice of law. This latter aspect is becoming increasingly important with the Woolf reforms and computerization of the procedural elements of law, but also in substantive law: for example, administrative systems are becoming more and more mediated by technology, and administrative law must be reviewed and re-worked in this context.

ABSTRACT One of the major planks of some visions for E-Gov is that there is a willing participatory group who are more than happy to be involved in new forms of democracy and will be active and useful suppliers of input to e-consultation or e-participation processes. This group is different from that which goes online to the government website and signs a petition asking the prime minister to resign. It is becoming clear, though, that the commitment to e-participation may well be there in theory, but difficult to access in practice. Further, the participation that is most welcome can frequently require training and expertise that is not widely available or there may be differences in opinion as to the point of participation. In this paper I will look to the attempts to encourage participation in the patent system. The UK has initiated a trial system utilising New York Law School's Peer-To-Patent project, but has also attempted to involve participants in previous consultation exercises. I will use these as demonstrations of the sorts of problems that e-participation has met, and consider whether this new form of E-Gov is perhaps being oversold. The interesting question is whether participation is a growing tool that can ensure better public services from the State. My conclusion is that consultation and participatory projects can demonstrate involvement and are certainly educative, but e-participatory projects are most likely incapable of achieving the goals set by their more optimistic advocates. The paper emphasises the patents field, but the lessons from it can – I suggest – be viewed as indicators having wider governance relevance. The primary point being made is that the technocratic view is always over-optimistic.

ABSTRACT There is much interest in moving AI out into real world applications, a move which has been encouraged by recent funding which has attempted to show industry and commerce can benefit from the Fifth Generation of computing. In this article I suggest that the legal application area is one which is very much more complex than it might — at first sight — seem. I use arguments from the sociology of law to indicate that the viewing of the legal system as simply a rule-bound discipline is inherently nave. This, while not new in jurisprudence, is — as the literature of AI and law indicates — certainly novel to the field of artificial intelligence. The socio-legal argument provided is set within the context of AI as one more example of the failure of scientific success and method to easily transmit itself over into the social sciences.

This paper describes the ESRC funded research project on constructing a methodology for legal cal (CMLCAL). The project is mainly aimed at examining the way in which computer assisted learning (CAL) courses were developed by a selected group of academics in the United Kingdom. The medium selected for the courses was LEXICAL, an authoring system developed at Queen's University of Belfast with support from IBM UK Trust, which has been distributed to BILETA members. The project has provided a number of insights mb the problems involved in CAL development, and strategies for the future. It has also resulted in the development of a number of useful CAL tutorials which will be distributed free to the academic community.

ABSTRACT Cynthia Fellows, Philip Leith and Joe Ury report on the survey responses to a usage and attitudinal project carried out in early 2012 by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII). There were 3,274 survey participants and their responses demonstrate substantial support for BAILII as an open access mechanism, a technically competent dissemination tool and a useful resource for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Such positive response, we suggest, indicates that BAILII's resources are now threaded through the fabric of UK digital legal information, strengthening the ability of all citizens to access and become better informed about the laws of the land.

ABSTRACT We previously wrote critically on the UK's welfare computerization programme of the 1980s and in this article we investigate the latest programme. Our argument is that welfare is being seen and is being understood in a technological context rather than a truly welfare one—that is, that the technology behind the computerization projects model views of how welfare recipients should be processed. In the 1980s, the computer model that was being applied was one of data processing (i.e. the 'business model'). In the 2000s, it is the model of computer-based communication (i.e. the 'Internet model'). But further, the new technological communication model is being effused with an ethical aspect—that those who do not communicate are lacking in socio-ethical responsibility to society, and are deemed not to be truly living up to their role as citizens.

1 Prof. Philip Leith, School of Law, Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN. E-mail: p.leithqub.ac.uk 2 CCSR, Faculty of Social Sciences & Law, Crawford House, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL. 3 Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament ...

ABSTRACT The history of publishing legal decisions (law reporting) in the UK has been that of a privatised system since its inception, and that history has encompassed several hundred years. The privatised nature of this has meant that the product (the law report) has been, except in limited cases, viewed as the property of the publisher, rather than the property of the court or public. BAILII is an open access legal database that came about in part because of the copyrighted, privatised nature of this legal information. In this paper, we will outline the problem of access to pre-2000 judgments in the UK and consider whether there are legal or other remedies which might enable BAILII to both develop a richer historic database and also to work in harmony, rather than in competition, with legal publishers. We argue that public access to case law is an essential requirement in a democratic common law system, and that BAILII should be seen as a potential step towards a National Law Library.