John O. McGinnis (Northwestern University – School of Law) & Steven Wasick have posted Law: An Information Technology on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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This article offers an historical, theoretical and practical perspective of law as an information technology. Law fundamentally concerns information — providing information to the community about the content of legal norms and, at least in its common law form, eliciting information about the world from the disputes before a court. After a brief survey of law’s history as an information technology, the article applies information theory to understand recent developments in an important aspect of that technology — legal search. Information theory focuses on the signal to noise ratio of communication. The key to progress in creating a better computerized legal search engine is to reduce the signal to noise ratio in the link between the user and the search engine. As this ratio decreases, we show that legal search translates the uncompressed form of legal information into an algorithm for predicting what the law will be in a particular situation. Computerized legal search can therefore become the law itself.
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This transformation is changing the optimal form of the law by changing the cost of finding it. It rebalances the weights in the classic debate between rules and standards. In particular, exponential increases in computational power make standards relatively more attractive than rules by decreasing the costs of their application. These same increases also allow us to embed information gathering processes within the law itself by creating dynamic rules. These are rules that could be designed by legislatures as algorithms, set to respond automatically to changing empirical information. Since we believe that standards and dynamic rules are likely to be prevalent legal forms of the coming era, we close our article with a comparison of their relative benefits.
Recommended.