Computational law is the branch of legal informatics concerned with the automation of legal reasoning. What distinguishes Computational Law systems from other instances of legal technology is their autonomy, i.e. the ability to answer legal questions without additional input from human legal experts.
While there are many possible applications of Computational Law, the primary focus of work in the field today is compliance management, i.e. the development and deployment of computer systems capable of assessing, facilitating, or enforcing compliance with rules and regulations. Some systems of this sort already exist. TurboTax is a good example. And the potential is particularly significant now due to recent technological advances – including the prevalence of the Internet in human interaction and the proliferation of embedded computer systems (such as smart phones, self-driving cars, and robots).
There are also applications that do not involve governmental laws. The regulations can just as well be the terms of contracts (e.g. delivery schedules, insurance covenants, real estate transactions, financial agreements).Surden, Harry. , U.C. Davis Law Review Vol 46 (2012): 629-676. They can be the policies of corporations (e.g. constraints on travel, expenditure reporting, pricing rules). They can even be the rules of games (embodied in computer game playing systems).
History Speculation about potential benefits to legal practice through applying methods from computational science and AI research to automate parts of the law date back at least to the middle 1940s.18 Rocky Mntn. L. Rev. 378 (1945-1946) Does the Law Need a Technological Revolution; Kelso, Louis O. Further, AI and law and computational law do not seem easily separable, as perhaps most of AI research focusing on the law and its automation appears to utilize computational methods. The forms that speculation took are multiple and not all related in ways to readily show closeness to one another. This history will sketch them as they were, attempting to show relationships where they can be found to have existed.
By 1949, a minor academic field aiming to incorporate electronic and computational methods to legal problems had been founded by American legal scholars, called jurimetrics.33 Minn. L. Rev. 455 (1948-1949) Jurimetrics--The Next Step Forward; Loevinger, Lee Though broadly said to be concerned with the application of the "methods of science" to the law, these methods were actually of a quite specifically defined scope. Jurimetrics was to be "concerned with such matters as the quantitative analysis of judicial behavior, the application of communication and information theory to legal expression, the use of mathematical logic in law, the retrieval of legal data by electronic and mechanical means, and the formulation of a calculus of legal predictability".Loevinger, Lee. "Jurimetrics: The methodology of legal inquiry." Law and Contemporary Problems (1963): 5-35. At 8.
These interests led in 1959 to the founding a journal, Modern Uses of Logic in Law, as a forum wherein articles would be published about the applications of techniques such as mathematical logic, engineering, statistics, etc. to the legal study and development."About Jurimetrics." About the Journal. American Bar Association Section of Science & Technology Law and the Center for Law, Science & Innovation, n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2014. <http://www.law.asu.edu/jurimetrics/JurimetricsJournal/AbouttheJournal.aspx >. In 1966, this Journal was renamed as Jurimetrics.Ibid, Today, however, the journal and meaning of jurimetrics seems to have broadened far beyond what would fit under the areas of applications of computers and computational methods to law. Today the journal not only publishes articles on such practices as found in computational law, but has broadened jurimetrical concerns to mean also things like the use of social science in law or the "policy implications [of] and legislative and administrative control of science".Ibid.
Independently in 1958, at the Conference for the Mechanization of Thought held at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, UK, the French jurist Lucien Mehl presented a paper both on the benefits of using computational methods for law and on the potential means to use such methods to automate law for a discussion that included AI luminaries like Marvin Minsky.Mechanization of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th November 1958. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1959. Print.Niblett, Bryan. Computer Science and the Law: Inaugural Lecture of the Professor of Computer Science Delivered at the College on January 25, 1977. Swansea, Wales: U College of Swansea, 1977. 7-8. Print. Mehl believed that the law could by automated by two basic distinct, though not wholly separable, types of machine. These were the "documentary or information machine", which would provide the legal researcher quick access to relevant case precedents and legal scholarship,"Automation in the Legal World." Mechanization of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th November 1958. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1959. 755-87. Print. At 759. and the "consultation machine", which would be "capable of answering any question put to it over a vast field of law"."Automation in the Legal World." Mechanization of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th November 1958. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1959. 755-87. Print. At 768-769. The latter type of machine would be able to basically do much of a lawyer's job by simply giving the "exact answer to a [legal] problem put to it".Ibid. 768.
By 1970, Mehl's first type of machine, one that would be able to retrieve information, had been accomplished but there seems to have been little consideration of further fruitful intersections between AI and legal research.Some Speculation about Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning Bruce G. Buchanan and Thomas E. Headrick, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Nov., 1970), pp. 40-62. At p. 40. There were, however, still hopes that computers could model the lawyer's thought processes through computational methods and then apply that capacity to solve legal problems, thus automating and improving legal services via increased efficiency as well as shedding light on the nature of legal reasoning.Some Speculation about Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning Bruce G. Buchanan and Thomas E. Headrick, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Nov., 1970), pp. 40-62. At pp. 51-60. By the late 1970s, computer science and the affordability of computer technology had progressed enough that the retrieval of "legal data by electronic and mechanical means" had been achieved by machines fitting Mehl's first type and were in common use in American law firms.Legal Decisions and Information Systems. Jon Bing and Trygve Harvold. Oslo, Norway: Universitets Forlaget; 1977Niblett, Bryan. B. Niblett, editor. Computer Science and Law: An Advanced Course. Cambridge University Press, 1980. During this time, research focused on improving the goals of the early 1970s occurred, with programs like Taxman being worked on in order to both bring useful computer technology into the law as practical aids and to help specify the exact nature of legal concepts.See, e.g., L. Thorne McCarty, Reflections on Taxman: An Experiment in Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning, 90 Harv. L. Rev. 837-895 (1977).
Nonetheless, progress on the second type of machine, one that would more fully automate the law, remained relatively inert. Research into machines that could answer questions in the way that Mehl's consultation machine would picked up somewhat in the late 1970s and 1980s. A 1979 convention in Swansea, Wales marked the first international effort solely to focus upon applying artificial intelligence research to legal problems in order to "consider how computers can be used to discover and apply the legal norms embedded within the written sources of the law".
Considerable progress on the development of the second type of machine was made in the following decade, with the development of a variety of expert systems. According to Thorne McCarty,McCarty, L. Thorne. "Artificial Intelligence and Law: How to get there from here." Ratio Juris 3.2 (1990): 189-200. "these systems all have the following characteristics: They do backward chaining inference from a specified goal; they ask questions to elicit information from the user; and they produce a suggested answer along with a trace of the supporting legal rules." According to Prakken and Sartor the representation of the British Nationality Act as a logic program, which introduced this approach, was "hugely influential for the development of computational representations of legislation, showing how logic programming enables intuitively appealing representations that can be directly deployed to generate automatic inferences". In 2021, this work received the Inaugural CodeX Prize as "one of the first and best-known works in computational law, and one of the most widely cited papers in the field."
In a 1988 review of Anne Gardner's book An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning (1987), the Harvard academic legal scholar and computer scientist Edwina Rissland wrote that "She plays, in part, the role of pioneer; artificial intelligence ("AI") techniques have not yet been widely applied to perform legal tasks. Therefore, Gardner, and this review, first describe and define the field, then demonstrate a working model in the domain of contract offer and acceptance."Rissland, Edwina. "Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning: A Discussion of the Field and Gardner's Book." AI Magazine 9.3 (1988): 45. Eight years after the Swansea conference had passed, and still AI and law researchers merely trying to delineate the field could be described by their own kind as "pioneer[s]".
In the 1990s and early 2000s more progress occurred. Computational research generated insights for law.See, e.g., Kades, Eric, "The Laws of Complexity & the Complexity of Laws: The Implications of Computational Complexity Theory for the Law" 49 Rutgers Law Review 403-484 (1997) The First International Conference on AI and the Law occurred in 1987, but it is in the 1990s and 2000s that the biannual conference began to build up steam and to delve more deeply into the issues involved with work intersecting computational methods, AI, and law.Rissland, E. L., Ashley, K. D., & Loui, R. P. (2003). AI and Law: A fruitful synergy. Artificial Intelligence, 150(1-2), 1-15.Bench-Capon, Trevor, Michał Araszkiewicz, Kevin Ashley, Katie Atkinson, Floris Bex, Filipe Borges, Daniele Bourcier et al. "A history of AI and Law in 50 papers: 25 years of the international conference on AI and Law." Artificial Intelligence and Law 20, no. 3 (2012): 215-319.See "International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL)."International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL). The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2014. <http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~LEY/db/conf/icail/index.html>. The citation includes all past conferences and links to their contents. It appears that during the 1990s the number of papers presented, talks given, etc. increased significantly from the first two conferences held respectively in 1987 and 1989. Classes began to be taught to undergraduates on the uses of computational methods to automating, understanding, and obeying the law.See, e.g., this syllabus from Stanford for CS 204 Computers and Law. Genesereth, Michael R. "CS 204: Computers and Law." CS204: Computers and Law. Stanford University, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. <http://logic.stanford.edu/classes/cs204/>.