This study presents a new analysis of an iconic United States Supreme Court case, Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892). The question in Holy Trinity Church concerned whether a law making it illegal to pay the transportation of a person entering the U.S. under contract to perform “labor
The United States Constitution prohibits federal officials from receiving any “present, Emolument, Office or Title” from a foreign state without the consent of Congress. In interpreting the Constitution’s text, we are to be guided “by the principle that ‘[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters;
In 1973, experts Homer Kripke and John J. Slain published a
seminal study titled The Interface Between Securities Regulation and
Bankruptcy—Allocating the Risk of Illegal Securities Issuance
between Securityholders and the Issuer’s Creditors. That lengthy
analysis, contributed by, respectively, a former Securities and
Exchange Commission official and a
The advantages of evidence-based decision-making in the practice and theory of law should be obvious: Don’t make arguments to judges that seldom persuade; Jurisprudential analysis ought to align with sound social science; Attorneys should pitch legal work to clients that demonstrably need it. Despite the appearance of simplicity, there
Practitioners use artificial-intelligence (AI) tools in fields as varied as finance, medicine, human resources, marketing, sports, and many others. Now, for the first time, lawyers are beginning to use similar tools in the delivery of legal services. Where once lawyers may have only used AI for electronic discovery (eDiscovery), today
In this project, the authors obtained public data on over 100,000 Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases and used machine and deep-learning methodologies to explore whether models could be designed to predict Chapter 11 case outcomes. The data used was obtained from the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy Integrated Database and
The nature of legal services is drastically changing given the rise in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Legal education and training models are beginning to recognize the need to incorporate skill building in data and technology platforms, but they have lost sight of a core competency for
To give you a feel for the power of legal analytics, imagine that you are the managing partner of a law firm. With a good set of algorithms and the push of a few buttons, you can make sure that you’ve delegated each part of an assignment to the
Artificial-intelligence technological advancements bring automation and predictive analytics into patent prosecution. The information asymmetry between inventors and patent examiners is expanded by artificial intelligence, which transforms the inventor– examiner interaction to machine–human interactions. In response to automated patent drafting, automated office-action responses, “cloems” (computer-generated word permutations) for defensive patenting,
This paper surveys three basic legal-text analytic techniques—ML, network diagrams, and question answering (QA)—and illustrates how some currently available commercial applications employ or combine them. It then examines how well the text analytic techniques can answer legal questions given some inherent limitations in the technology. In more detail,
Much has been written recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and law. But what is AI, and what is its relation to the practice and administration of law? This article addresses those questions by providing a high-level overview of AI and its use within law. The discussion aims to be nuanced