Law in a Digital World potx

[...]... question to ask Even if "judicial machines" never become available to actually decide cases or interpret points of law, we must still evaluate what role machines will play and what impact it will have that we are not simply reading off the screen but are interacting with increasingly sophisticated machines WESTLAW, for example, now allows legal information to be obtained by asking questions in ordinary English... think about law It raises questions about whether doctrines that assume that information can be contained and controlled, such as copyright and privacy, will continue to be effectively supported This book is largely organized as a set of alternating chapters about technology and law The legal chapters focus primarily on the following: law libraries and accessing legal information, forming and managing... telling experiences occurred when, as a young man, he was serving as an apprentice to a riverboat captain While at the helm one day, Twain perceived danger lurking under the surface and, without consulting the captain, suddenly changed course The captain, a man named Bixby, immediately asked him to account for his action and Twain replied that he had seen an underwater hazard, a bluff reef, just ahead... and changed than when it is guarded and protected It is a space that calls for effective processes for resolving conflict and managing change The late Robert Cover once wrote: We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void The student of law may come 20 Law in a Digital World to identify the normative world with the professional paraphernalia of... retain information and learn from it, but there is also no sharing of information among these machines The VCR information stays in the VCR, for example, and the dishwasher information in the dishwasher Whether you consider these machines smart or not very smart, they are isolated 12 Law in a Digital World machines, communicating with their owners in a very limited manner and unable to communicate at all... change and what is not, what it means that letters affixed to paper by printing presses increasingly are appearing as flashing lights on a screen or as strings of ones and zeros encoded in electronic form, and what are the bluff reefs and what are the wind reefs For Twain, the shimmering and beguiling "face of the water" eventually became reliable and informative, "a wonderful book." Today, more and... ordinary disk and an entire encyclopedia can be placed on a single CD-ROM We become able to use distant computers as easily as we use our own, and we can interact with people located far away as if they were next door We can obtain information that was previously distant, not only in the sense that it was far away but also in that it was inaccessible because special skills were required in order to access... familiar and stable information environment Perhaps even from one part of our minds to another And where is law going? To a place where information is increasingly on screen instead of on paper To a place where there are new opportunities for interacting with the law and where there are also significant challenges to the legal profession and to traditional legal practices and concepts To an unfamiliar and... and images were used Print, while providing us with many beautiful books of art, tended to support text more than 18 Law in a Digital World images It was easier and cheaper to print text than images, particularly colorful images Partly because of this, the print world of law is a largely imageless world In the legal worlds of print, "fine print," and "black letter law, " there is little other than text... medical advances, have caused a reassessment of several areas of legal doctrine Yet, information technology is different and presents the law with a very different kind of challenge It is different because, as noted, the law runs on information and because much of law is information Thus, all of law is not affected by the automobile because law is not composed of automobiles But law is, in almost all .