Legal Expert Systems: A Humanistic Critique of Mechanical Legal Interface
AbstractThe author surveys a wide range of computerised expert systems and shows that they invariably rely on pattern-matching and rule application strategies which have been embodied in their inference mechanisms and knowledge representations. This computational approach is argued to be unsuitable for use with law which presents a domain of intractable complexity arising out of the need to refer to social context and human purpose in resolving legal issues. The author concludes that a better use for computation in legal applications is in the form of decision- support systems that leave legal inference to human agents. |