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"I am first of all not a science fiction writer … I write, I suppose, what the Latin Americans call magic realism."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Lawyer Program | ||
| Software that could listen to legal argument. |
If you get in trouble, you'd better know the URL of a good lawyer program.
| Spivey held up one hand. "First I must tell you, Mr. Eng, that what we're about to discuss is highly classified. Top secret."
Logan winced. "I want my lawyer program." The officer smiled placatingly. "I assure you it's all legal..." |
| From Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
|
In the book, lawyer programs are also described as being good for investigating how to work with (and around) existing laws:
Not that fighting was strictly illegal. Some gangs with good lawyer programs had found loopholes and tricks. Ra Boys, in particular, were brutal with sarcasm... pushing a guy so hard he'd lose his temper, and accept a nighttime battle rendezvous or some suicidal dare...
It's not exactly the same, but a lawyer program has to talk to someone - or something. See the robot judge from Harry Harrison's 1959 story Robot Justice. That robot must be running some kind of legal software. Also, see the law clerk robot from Pohl's The Midas Plague.
As far as I know, the first "knowledge-based systems" for the law appeared in the early 1980's. The prize for earliest speculation on this topic goes to lawyers themselves, and dates from a 1949 paper by Lee Loevinger titled Jurimetrics. The Next Step Forward.
But even though no geeps were watching now, dozens must have recorded both parties converging on this spot... chronicle's they'd happily zap-fax to police investigating a brawl after the fact.
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- Law Firms To Undergo 'Structural Collapse' Due Artificially Intelligent Systems
- DoNotPay Lawyer Program Contests Parking Tickets
- 'Do Not Pay' Chatbots To Replace Law Firm Associates?
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'CIC uses [it] to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns...'
'With one fluid motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone.'
'Its lines wavered, flowed, and then painfully reformed. For an interval, the device struggled with itself...'
'The program raced up the screen one scan line at a time, subtly smoothing, deleting and coloring.'
'The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all.'
I can't resist science-fictional elements. Especially when they're real.
'The heart of it was a vast hexagonal structure of welded metal, ten miles across...'
