Over the years I’ve spoken with many people who believe they “have a book in them” or an idea for a book. But to take liberties paraphrasing Stephen Fry’s protagonist in The Hippopotamus: books aren’t made up of ideas, they’re made up of words. So how do you string those words together at scale? Firstly, … Continued
This is the first article in a series of three on the Canadian Legal Problems Survey and what its findings say about the legal market. We often say that 80% of legal problems are not being addressed in the legal system, but how closely does that figure match measured reality, and how could we approach … Continued
My Slaw column “The Case for Algorithmic Skepticism in Law” was included in the March/April 2023 issue of American Association of Law Libraries’ magazine Spectrum. You can read if here on pages 38-39. It was originally published here.
Law is a unique and important dataset: to a large degree it is a record of governance. It also tends to be conservative, so people can know what is likely to happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. Structurally, it has elements in common with other large text-based collections, such … Continued
The end of the year is a time when we frequently think about what has happened in the past and what will come in the future. One of the things that is often considered in this context is technological changes.
It’s about two years since my first forecast column for Slaw, and as the future is always rising to meet us, I thought I would do an updated version as we approach 2023.
Algorithms have become ubiquitous in our society, yet they are widely misunderstood. Many of these misunderstandings arise from widespread lack of understanding of the technical basis for what algorithms are and how they function, but even experts often don’t understand how they work, only that they do in many situations. This lack of understanding means … Continued
Sarah spoke on a panel titled “Law Librarian as Algorithmic Skeptic” at the American Association of Law Libraries Conference in Denver, Colorado on July 17, 2022 with Sarah Lamdan from CUNY Law School, and Kim Nayyer from Cornell Law Library. Susan Nevelow Mart who was also scheduled to speak couldn’t attend, though her comments were … Continued
A book chapter titled “The Law and Politics of Legal Data” was published in the July-August 2022 (volume 5, issue 4) of Journal of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & Law published by Fastcase’s Full Court Press. This is a closed publication, but it can be accessed on HeinOnline for those with access.
Sarah gave a presentation titled “Primary Law as Data” at Continuing Legal Education Society of BC’s course Data Analytics for Lawyers 2022 on June 27, 2022. The session covered the following: what is law from a data perspective? how does the structure of the law and legal systems affect its use as data? so what … Continued