HACKING THE LAW

Aims and Observations

About Me….

Kevin P. Lee Associate Professor of Law

Campbell University

leek@campbell.edu

What is “Hacking the Law”?

• Legal hackers are creative problem-solvers who want to improve the law for lawyers, clients, and society as a whole.

• They want to re-examine old ideas about law and innovate by using new technologies to respond to the issues of today.

Core Values:

• Information-sharing across disciplines is a powerful positive good!

• Technology needs to be informed by legal practitioners, social scientists, and legal philosophers.

Eric Raymond

• “The belief that information is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by … facilitating access to information and computer resources wherever possible.”

What’s New?

Tech

PsychologyEconomics

Technology and Today’s Lawyer

Richard Susskind

• Richard has a first class honours degree in law from the University of Glasgow and a doctorate in law and computers from Balliol College, Oxford.

• He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Computer Society.

Susskind’s Books

Richard Susskind

Three Challenges

• “More for less”

• Liberalization (of practice restrictions)

• Information Technology

Richard Suskind’s Analysis

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Low cost memory

Increased and ubiquitous computing power

Kryder’s Law and Big Data

• Kryder’s Law: Memory storage doubles every 6 mos.

Prediction

• One petabyte—enough space for 13 years of continuous videos—will cost about $750 in 5 years.

• 5 Petabytes would hold every document ever written from the dawn of history.

• Facebook holds 100 petabytes on its servers

Purchase Price/One Gigabyte

1981-$300,000

1994-$1,000

2004-$1

2011-$0.10

Computing Power

• Moore’s Law• Computational power doubles every six months.

Data Driven Legal Practice

• Predictive Analytics• Machine Learning

This goes way beyond “e-discovery”

• Measuring Quality• Predictive cost analysis

• Predicting relevant Documents

• Predicting case outcome• Valuing Cases

Wired Magazine—the Rise of Machine Lawyers?

Technology and Today’s Lawyer?

ECONOMIC FACTORS

THE DECLINE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

Middle class income has declined 6% since 2000

Stagnation in middle class income

THE IMPACT ON LEGAL EDUCATION

• Law School Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs are Cut

• New York Times January 30, 2013,

Declines in median starting salaries

Class of 2011

Class of 2011 Has Lowest Employment Rate Since Class of 1994

NALP Bulletin, July 2012

The Crisis for Law Schools

PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS

Aristotle Quote #1

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

MRI Brain Scans

Big Data Brain Mapping

Aristotle Quote #2

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”

Science of Happiness?

Happiness strategies

Aristotle Quote # 3

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

What goals should the law pursue?

ETHICAL CONCERNS

Changing Jurisprudence?

• In the future, legal theory will focus more on technical aspects related to prediction.

A RECENT CALL FOR PAPERS• “THE MANY FACES OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND

THEORY OF LAW”• Conference on the occasion of the 10th anniversary Section of the

Philosophy of Law  TBSP UJ• Cracow, 23-24 March 2013• The aim of the conference is to integrate different points of view in

contemporary philosophy of law. The conference will be divided into two special working groups: the first one will be entirely devoted to the application of the Bayesian analysis in legal settings. The second one will be a general presentation of the variety of contemporary issues in the philosophy of law. The organizers invite lawyers, psychologists, philosophers and all interested to participate.

• Conference language is Polish and English (Organizers will not provide translations).

Why this shift matters…• Legal theorists will, of course, continue to think about the

nature of law, but with less attention to the moral meaning of law and the goals law seeks obtain.

Computational Legal Studies

Attempts to reduce legal reasoning to patterns of logical relation that can be mimicked by simple computations are becoming dominant.

What’s Missing in Rule of the Machines

“Neo-liberalism”— A growing commitment to being a “Market Society.”

• Market Economy—refers to free markets.• Market Society—refers to the values of free markets

taking over all of society. (Michael Sandel)

Neoliberalism is fundamentally opposed to discourse on the ends and purposes of law. (anti-teleological). See, e.g. Raymond Plant, The Neo-Liberal State

But can democracy thrive with the dominance of this new, more formalistic and reductive approach?

Does Democracy Need Discourse on Purposes?

Robin West, Normative Jurisprudence, 44.

Our happiness, our well-being, our capabilities, our flourishing, our functioning, and even our much-maligned pleasure cannot be reduced to the sum of the utilities we seek…

What is lost is the centrality of the human as the object of law’s regard.