Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> The reasons this problem exists are complex, but they boil down to the fact that laws and the links between them are not being published in ways computers can easily process, making it difficult to extract the valuable information they contain. If the format were computer-friendly, it is easy to imagine leveraging the links between laws to improve search results.

This is totally untrue. Legal documents are linked together with citations written according to very precise rules, which lawyers spend a lot of time getting correct. Almost all laws and cases are published in a quasi-append-only record: sequential publications in reporters organized by volume and page number. So unlike URLs on the Internet, 47 F.3d 167 will always refer to the same page of the same case. Forever. Most agency decisions, etc, have similar sequential records. Statues and regulations are precisely identified by structured citations as well. WestLaw and Lexis have no problem parsing these, and will happily find you all the cases that cite to say a specific Supreme Court case from 1880.

The reasons lawyers use terms and connectors searches instead of a "Google-like" engine is because the underlying concept of Page Rank absolutely sucks for legal research. Page Rank equates in-degree in the link graph with relevance. This will get you highly cited cases that you knew anyway that are only tangentially related to the cases you actually need.

In a legal brief, a couple of trial court decisions that are factually similar but uncited are infinitely more valuable than a highly cited Supreme Court case that happens to pertain to the same general area of law.

Why are they more valuable?

Judges like to see how other judges have ruled in similar situations. A generic SCOTUS opinion on a topic doesn't help too much.

In addition to VCQ's point below, there is the fact that such cases are often simply not helpful despite technically being relevant. A seminal Supreme Court case might state the broad principle of law: e.g. you have a right to due process before losing government entitlements. But stuff like that is never actually disputed. In practice the dispute is over e.g. "how much process is enough?" or "when does a government benefit rise to the level of an entitlement?" The judge knows the big overarching Supreme Court case. While it's technically relevant, it's not helpful. What you need as the lawyer is to show the judge case law that supports your specific argument applying that general principle.

Also elaborating on VCQ's point: I was trained that when citing cases to a court:

(1) The best case to cite is one where the previous trial judge ruled in favor of the position that's being taken on an issue by your opponent, but the trial judge was reversed on appeal on that issue;

(2) Next-best is one where the previous trial judge ruled in favor of the position that you're now taking and was affirmed on appeal; and

(3) The worst of all cases to cite is one where the previous trial judge ruled against the position you're taking and was affirmed on appeal; if you're going to cite that kind of case, you must find some way to distinguish your facts from those of the previous case.

It's great fun when your opponent cites a case in support of a position, and then upon reading the case you discover that the case went against the party that took your opponent's position.

EDIT: Which reminds me of a related story: My late senior partner, mentor, and friend, Tom Arnold, was once arguing a point before a judge. His opponent, seeking to discredit Tom's argument, cited a law-review article that Tom had recently published, where Tom had argued the exact opposite of the position he was taking before the judge. Tom didn't miss a beat: He responded, in effect: Your Honor, my friend is correct: My article does take exactly the opposite position from what I argue here today. I still hold to the view expressed in that article. What my friend hasn't told you is that my article criticized a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. No matter what my personal view of the Court's decision might be, it's the law of the land unless and until the Court changes its mind or Congress changes the statute. And under the Court's decision, my client is entitled to prevail.

Tom won the argument, of course.

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