Electronic Computers and the Practical Lawyer

s of case law. Why is this not the answer also to the problem of 1962] COMMNENTS JOURNAL OF LEGAL EDUCATION searching the text of case law? Perhaps it is. Mr. Horty is now experimenting with attorney general opinions and will later include cases. Others remain skeptical. In the meantime, systems such as those developed respectively by the Patent Office and Robert T. Morgan at Oklahoma State University attempt to store only the text of case abstracts. One problem is that the volume of case law is overwhelmingly greater than that of statute law. Secondly, judicial opinions are written much more loosely and in a far more heterogeneous language. A vocabulary list for a large body of case law comparable to that developed for the hospital statutes would approach the dimensions of a good-sized dictionary. Would this be too unwieldy for the average researcher? Only experience can tell. Some of the difficulties here can be lessened by carefully converting the vocabulary list into a more selective general thesaurus, with helpful cross references to synonymus or equivalent expressions and to higher levels and lower levels of abstraction. In the meantime, Mr. Horty's approach offers immediate rewards in the field of statutes. Perhaps the most fruitful prospect offered by these developments is the opportunity they may provide to search the full text of legal opinions, not so much for relevant legal principles as for similar kinds of fact situations. If we have an automobile case involving a bee sting, use of the traditional index or table of contents in a field so rich with case law is likely to produce more judicial text than we can conveniently sift. Instead, by using the fact categories referred to in the text and thus reflected in the working thesaurus, we should be able to locate very quickly the automobile bee-sting cases, limited by whatever other factors we please. This opens up broad new possibilities of research. Because these mechanical and electronic devices free classification from the hierarchical and physical limitations that conventional indices and tables of contents now impose, they make it possible to abstract and classify in much greater depth than is now feasible with conventional methods. Project Lawsearch,u3 for example, which is now using the peek-a-boo system to abstract and index 4,000 cases relating to motor carriers, appears to be classifying in greater depth (as many as forty search terms per case) than has heretofore been feasible. Even so, the searching of original text offers far more depth and flexibility. For this reason, Mr. Horty and the programmers at the University of Pittsburgh are studying the structure of judicial opinions to perfect methods by which significant word juxtapositions, combinations, and proximities can be identified and used for searching purposes. Unfortunately, the costs of putting the text of any large body of case law on tape would be prohibitive at the present time, because of the expense of 12 Efforts in this direction are now being made under 'Mr. Horty's direction at the University of Pittsburgh and under Mr. Robert A. Wilson at the Southwestern Legal Foundation. 13 Sponsored by the Council on Library Resources, Inc., assisted by three large law publishers and the American Association of Law Libraries. William H. B. -Thomas is directing the indexing phase. [VoL. 14