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AI and the Law: The Paradigm Shift Hits the Fan

By Pamela Woldow
January 01, 2017

What would you think if you heard that a bunch of people had gone into one of the world's greatest libraries, sliced the spines off all the books, physically cut the guts out of them, and then fed the loose pages into a machine?

In a spectacular act of self-mutilation, Harvard Law School, whose library is unmatched except by the Library of Congress, has done just that. In its astonishing “Free the Law” project, Harvard has teamed up with a California start-up called Ravel Law to digitize every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times by feeding over 40 million pages physically cut from the books shelved in the Harvard Law Library into a high-speed digital scanner.

Watching this incredible scanner is like watching one of those bank bill-counting machines riffle through a stack of Jacksons, except in this case what's being riffled is the core and evolution of American legal knowledge, a searchable database of case law that eventually will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that now often must be paid for (Ravel Law hopes to offer, for a fee, more advanced analytical tools).

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