eelliott's comments

Drop me a line eddie (at) technicality.io

This approach doesn't acknowledge that law is a dynamically typed language, to continue your analogy. It responds to societal concerns and emotional and frequently irrational reasoning. There's a saying bad cases make bad law and I think this isn't going to change any time soon.

I agree entirely however law is like all professions where access to information is only half the equation, its application and interpretation is derived from extensive training and experience. So I'd argue that until we nail 'Google for the law', access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases

As a lawyer I've thought a lot about this (and if anyone is working on this and wants to talk get in touch). There are two reasons:

1. Reasoning in law relies on complex language semantics, both in statute and case law. Take for example a court decision that says "in the circumstances of this case I do not agree that John v Doe applies". That can be expressed a million ways and I'm not sure our natural language processing can replace humans yet in this area.

2. There is a lot of copyright problems that need to be overcome. Companies like Lexis and Westlaw own the rights to a lot of decisions and even statutes and can paywall the . This is slowly changing however, for example in the UK recently the courts took back the rights to publish decisions.