LL.M. Studies in the United States - Do We Have Something to Learn?

I interviewed three women who took part in LL.M. studies in the US during the academic year 2010–2011. The interviewees were born 1980–1982 and graduated from Law School in Helsinki and Turku in 2006–2007. LL.M. studies were conducted at the Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School and the New York University School of Law (NYU Law). My goal was to examine the American education and to compare it to the Finnish legal education.

In the learning environment in the US the work done before the lectures is emphasised. Students have to write reaction papers in which they consider the themes for the next lecture in advance. The epilogue after the lecture then brings the work together. The learning material is so large that students are forced to learn to identify relevant material and compress it before the exam. The process complies with problem solving and inquiry-based formula. Students work at the limits of their performance with the teacher.

There are some differences in the Anglo-American and continental legal systems. However, case-based learning has been successfully tested also in Finland. In Finland teachers often complain about the lack of debate. The work done before the lectures improves the level of the discussions. We must also remember that the debate is not necessarily at a very high level, if no one leads it. The teacher in the United States is not a partner and a coach, but an authority, whose position is based on know-how. This is an exception in relation to the tradition of inquiry learning. The view and the teacher identity are shaped by experience. The respondents stressed the importance of the experience of the teachers. Young researchers do not have a decade of experience. This can be compensated by a desire to develop.

To write reaction papers before the lectures is a good way to improve the quality of the discussions and interactivity in classes. In this case, lectures may be fruitful for the teacher as well. A teacher's toolbox should also include articles and court cases to analyze. It is not enough to go through students' seminar papers.

This is an excerpt of an article published in Lakimies 2012/1:

http://www.edilex.fi.libproxy.helsinki.fi/lakikirjasto/8635.pdf

Games computers play, part n

While we wait for the next RoboCup, today's The New York Times has a story titled 'The Computer’s Next Conquest: Crosswords'. Crossword puzzles may seem like a trivial task solved quickly by brute force and a good word list without even having to look at the clues, but that depends a lot on the puzzle and a bit on the language as well. Morphology is of course not much of an issue for English, but as far as I know (and I'm by no means an expert here), neither is it usually one for Finnish, either, since the only inflections used in Finnish crosswords are typically only the singular and plural nominative and the first infinitive. Where it gets challenging are answers containing several words without indicated positions for intra-word spaces. The simplest brute force approach is to treat such an answer just as a string of random characters subject to a check for correctness afterwards. With a 15-character string and 26 characters to choose from, we get over 10^21 alternatives. Evaluating all those at a million per second would take only about five million years, and there might be two to four of them in a single puzzle... Of course, not all of the characters are unknown, but rather some characters can be determined based on orthogonal answers, which in turn limit the number of phonotactically permissible characters next to the ones already known. I suppose something like Markov chains together with some heuristics about typical patterns should do a much better job. Still, figuring out an answer like SNOISSIWNOOW might still remain a bit of a challenge.

Von IBM lernen heißt siegen lernen

(Paul Rand 1981)

IBM have a unique and highly visible record in AI winnage. While Herbert Simon and Allen Newell predicted already back in 1957 that a computer would beat the best human player in chess in only ten years' time, it took actually four times that long until IBM's Deep Blue finally won in a tournament against Garry Kasparov in 1997. Since then, computers have basically been unbeatable in chess. Over the years the work needed to reach this point has led to a number of reassessments regarding human cognition, how complex many tasks are and how good at least some of us actually are at them.

Another IBM Research landmark took place last year, when Watson, an AI program built to excel in Jeopardy!, beat two all-time champions in a specially televised tournament. Allegedly you can find the actual shows on Youtube (but of course I can't link to them because I'm a too much of a copyright prude). And of course there are bound to be more such landmark achievements to come. One of those could be delivered by the Blue Brain project, which is an attempt to build a molecular-level computer simulation of an entire human brain.

The game show Jeopardy! itself is perhaps not that well known in Finland. As far as I can remember, a local version of it ran on one of the channels I never watch for a season or two after which it was probably cancelled. It is a quiz format with 2 sets of 6 categories of questions with 5 questions each worth a different amount of money plus various added features. The questions or clues rely heavily on wordplay and all kinds of creative elements so it is definitely not just a matter of parsing the clue and looking up the answer, as the variability in the clues makes them impossible to interpret them correctly just by parsing. The most easily distinguishing characteristic of the game is that answers (at least pragmatically speaking) in turn have to be phrased syntactically in the form of a question. For a novice competitor of the human persuasion this of course adds to the cognitive load and occasionally makes them forget this, thus making even a factually correct answer technically incorrect. For a computer program equipped with a good lexical database, on the other hand, complying with this rule is fairly trivial: just check whether the answer is a person or not and whether it is singular or plural and prefix who/what and is/are accordingly. If you want to get really fancy, also see whether you should prefix the answer with an article (definite or indefinite).

Chess as a game is computationally closed. The numbers of pieces, their positions and possible moves and complete games are all finite. The number of possible games is enormous, and except for the very end of the game, it is quite simply impossible to even list all of them, never mind also evaluating all of them to see which move is the best one to take next. So while simpler games such as tic-tac-toe can be solved by simple brute force in an instant (see xkcd), Deep Blue had to rely heavily on heuristics and libraries of sequences of moves to accomplish its task. (By the way, Deep Blue used a great deal of dedicated custom hardware to do this, while Watson ran just on general-purpose computers.) Jeopardy!, on the other hand, is not computationally closed. The list of potential topics for the categories is unbounded, and typically a category combines at least two of them, described initially only through a clever and opaque title for the category.

As an occasional legal theorist and thus someone who is also interested in rules just for their own sake, at least for me it is interesting to note that for chess, the rules of the game itself are only about ten pages long. What is even more relevant is that Deep Blue does not even implement all of them properly. For example, the program was not able to recognize a tie, but rather relied on people to recognize such events. I have not been able to find a mention about what the program would have done in the event of an invalid move by its opponent that goes unnoticed by the judge, either. (Not that that is likely to be a real issue at that level.) And of course a computer is completely unaffected by such possible rule violations as Tal's devious and distracting smile, which was also used as an example by Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously p. 102). Chess and in particular Chess AI is therefore not a very good model for the legal field. As an application, it is not easily generalizable, and the market for chess processors must be quite limited.

Watson, on the other hand, was not built just to kick some human butt in Jeopardy! and to get a ton of publicity while doing it. IBM have announced plans to develop the underlying DeepQA technology further for deployment in a variety of fields of expertise, including law. For the time being it seems to me that they are strongly concentrating on the medical and financial sectors. (It certainly wouldn't surprise me if their market research had shown that lawyers are too conservative and not tech-savvy enough for it to be a potential commercial success, at least for now.) But there is still a live connection, as CMU, the academic home of both Deep Blue and Watson, is just down the street from Pitt Law School, one of the centres of AI & law research in the US. Watson principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci also gave a keynote address at ICAIL last June in Pittsburgh. We'll have to wait and see.

The idea of Watson, J., has even reached the top of the legal establishment at our poor frontiers (or whatever 'raukoilla rajoilla' is in English). At the Finnish Bar Association's annual conference this January, the Parliamentary Ombudsman of Finland, Petri Jääskeläinen, LL.D., opened his address (only in Finnish, sorry) with Watson (and Chicken Run, nice touch there) and the horror scenario of computers deciding cases of law. My own position on the issue is of course already on the record: I'm afraid neither my rank nor my GI tract are strong enough for me to trust my gut instincts enough to even consider the question whether without having at least some clues about the how, where and why as well. And right now we're really only getting to the point where we are shaping the right questions while at the same time trying to figure out at least tentative answers to them to see whether indeed even the questions make sense. It is not like decision-support systems or the evil robot judges will just appear out of nowhere (and for the time being the utter bogosity of public sector software procurement procedures is certainly the first and the best line of defence against them...), but rather they should preferably appear in contexts where they actually make all kinds of sense. Meanwhile, there are plenty of much less scary types of intelligent software technologies not used enough in the legal (especially information retrieval) field to get things started, but more about them later on.

More on Deep Blue and chess:
Feng-Hsiung Hsu: Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton UP 2002)
Diego Rasskin-Gutman: Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind (MIT Press 2009)
Pertti Saariluoma: Chess Players' Thinking: A Cognitive Psychological Approach (Routledge 1995)

More on Watson: IBM Research (lots of videos as well)

Are you interested in articles on file sharing?

So am I. With regard to the history, I started my "career" as a researcher by examining peer-to-peer file sharing. The first article I wrote as a student during a seminar course on criminal law. My teacher asked if I was interested in publishing my seminar paper as an article and of course I was. I still remember the feeling when the article was published. The second and third article I wrote together with my co-authors in a research project funded by Nokia Research Center. During that time I worked at Helsinki Institute of Information Technology and at Aalto University. Heikki Kokkinen from Nokia Research Center defended his dissertation about the subject:

http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2010/isbn9789526034935/

Have a look at these:

An article about copyright infringements and the principle of legal certainty (Tekijänoikeusrikoksen ja rikkomuksen tunnusmerkistöt ja seuraamukset epätäsmällisyyskiellon näkökulmasta tarkasteltuna):

Tekijänoikeutta voidaan pitää tietoyhteiskunnan Magna Cartana. Tieto ja kommunikaatio ovat informaatioyhteiskunnan kehityksen edellytyksiä. Tekijänoikeus suojaa kirjallista, auditiivista ja visuaalista informaatiota ja vaikuttaa näin informaation jakeluun ja leviämiseen. Tekijänoikeuslainsäädäntö vaikuttaa nyky-yhteiskunnassa jokaisen ihmisen arkipäivään. Yksityiset ihmiset ja kansalaisjärjestöt hyödyntävät päivittäin uusia viestintäteknologioita ja lähettävät sekä vastaanottavat informaatiota ja viestejä. Tämän vuoksi tekijänoikeuslainsäädännön tulisi olla erityisen selkeää ja ymmärrettävää. Käytännössä vaatimus ei kuitenkaan toteudu. Osittaisuudistuksin kehittynyttä tekijänoikeuslainsäädäntöä luonnehditaan yleisesti mutkikkaaksi ja vaikeaselkoiseksi. http://www.edilex.fi/lakikirjasto/5923.pdf

Criminal Friends of Entertainment: Analysing Results from Recent Peer-to-Peer Surveys:

Why are people massively infringing copyright law? Do file sharers see changes in their consumption from legal sources? Do they know what they are doing is illegal or do they just not care? The problem calls for further study. We conducted a web survey and asked questions about file sharing and copyright law. This paper describes the results of that survey. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol5-1/hietanen.asp

Laila, a File Sharing Indulgence Service:

This paper analyses Laila, a new online service, which enables consumers to legalize their previous file sharing in exchange for a payment. We examine how a voluntary consumer-driven payment changes the practices and proposals related to peer-to-peer file sharing. Then we describe how Laila is helping to legalize currently illegal file sharing. http://www.nir.nu/Journal/nir-2009-2

Turing Award to Judea Pearl

Today, the Association for Computing Machinery has named Dr. Judea Pearl as the recipient of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award (ACM press release), which is widely considered as the $DYNAMITE_PRIZE of computer science. The award was given for Dr. Pearl on his work for 'Develop[ing a] Novel Framework for Reasoning under Uncertainty that Changed How Scientists Approach Real World Problems'.


I have (and have read) Pearl's two major works, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann 1988) and Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (Cambridge UP 2000) and cannot praise them highly enough. Especially the first one has had an enormous impact on AI (though not so much AI & law), these days the Bayesian methods presented in it are quite simply ubiquitous and indispensable. I do have my reservations about their applicability to representing uncertainty in law, but more about that at some other time. (I have read Pearl's 1988 UCLA technical report on Non-Bayesian Formalisms for Managing Uncertainty as well, after all.) For a more sympathetic take on Bayesianism in law, see eg. Law and Truth: A Theory of Evidence by Hannu Tapani Klami, Minna Gräns, and Johanna Sorvettula (The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters 2000).


(via NYT Bits)

Technological Rationality: the Logos of Slavery or the Enabler of Human(e) Progress?

Technological development has faced criticism. The efficiency brought by industrialization and computer technology is expected to eventually lead to unpleasant outcome. The critics have developed by means of science-fiction stories about a future filled with technology. It is assumed that people stagnate and indulge only their animal desires. In the second scenario, the people become insensitive robots relying only on pure reason.

Herbert Marcuse was of the opinion that the logos of technology equals to the logos of slavery. People have become tools, even if it was thought that the technology releases persons. In his book One-dimensional Man published in 1964, Marcuse says that in the historical continuum man has been and will be the master of the other man. This is a social reality which societal changes do not affect. The basis for domination, however, has changed over the ages. Personal dependence has been replaced by an objective order of dependency, such as the dependency of a slave to the master has changed to the dependence of the economic laws and of the market. In accordance with Marcuse this higher form of rationality deprives natural and spiritual resources more efficiently and shares profits in a new way. A man can be seen as a slave in the production machinery and there is a battle of the existence in the production machinery. The battle affects with the destructive power the production machinery and its parts, such as builders and users.

Marcuse’s ideas certainly give some food for thought. And while I don’t completely agree with them. The development and use of intelligent machines face tremendous challenges in current legal systems. Technological development is stifled by liability risks. Due to both the technological limitations for perfectly functioning machines and the unpredictable cognitive element, intelligent machines are not perfect and it is almost guaranteed that there will be failures causing harm. However, this is not an excuse not to aim for failure-free operation. Instead, the inevitable failures should be managed so that present economical or legal issues do not hinder the potential human development and prosperity enabled through the adoption of new technologies. To read more about my and my co-author’s thoughts on this: http://www.njcl.utu.fi/2_2010/huttunen_anniina.pdf

Steve Fuller, New frontiers in science and technology (Polity, Cambridge 2007) 232 p

Herbert Marcuse, Yksiulotteinen ihminen: teollisen yhteiskunnan tarkastelua (W+G, Helsinki 1969) 262 p

What's this?

The title of this blog, Legal Futurology, contains a certain degree of deliberate ambiguity. You, Dear Reader, may wonder, what kind of a future we are talking about and what the law has to do it. At this point we don't expect we will be writing about futures (the financial instruments) or about future developments in the law in general, say, regarding the resolution of the financial crisis or the next EU treaty or planned directive this or statute that or what the court will (or should) decide in Rubber v. Glue or whatever. While we cannot promise to avoid such topics altogether (classic evasive move there), what we have in mind are some very specific aspects of the future and the law.

The future we are referring to is that of the William Gibson quotation 'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.' It is also that of Richard Susskind's book Future of Law*. And since at least one of us is a board-certified Legal Realist, there might be the odd dash of future in the sense of Prediction Theory thrown in as well.

More concretely, we both are researchers at the University of Helsinki working at the intersection of law and artificial intelligence. Our perspectives are quite different, as one of us (Anniina) studies AI as the object of legal regulation, whereas the other (Anna) studies AI as a tool to facilitate legal information retrieval or even do legal reasoning by itself. These complementary perspectives should open up for a broader range of topics than either one of us could do by herself. We are also planning to take advantage of this in more traditional fora through co-authored publications (stay tuned!).

Speaking of publications, we also see this blog as an opportunity to develop our research ideas in a manner better suited for a field in which the pace of technical development is so overwhelming that traditional publication-based academic discussion just doesn't cut it, especially if the ideas are slated for publication in a monograph x years from now rather than as a standalone article. We will of course also be writing about our own articles as well as interesting stuff we have read elsewhere. The style of the posts would probably not get past peer review (and anyway one can't just print out all one's blog posts and call it a dissertation, right?) but some of texts published here are bound to end up in our more serious publications more or less verbatim. To steal terminology from the software industry, we see this blog as a platform for rapid prototyping or Agile Development of our research ideas, which of course is very much in vogue these days. If you agree with what we write, we don't mind if you show it, and if you vehemently disagree with us, we would appreciate your (civil) comments even more.

Or, as put by the Agile Development guru Benjamin Cardozo:

'I sometimes think that we worry ourselves overmuch about the enduring consequences of our errors. They may work a little confusion for a time. In the end, they will be modified or corrected or their teachings ignored. The future takes care of such things. In the endless process of testing and retesting, there is a constant rejection of the dross, and a constant retention of whatever is pure and sound and fine.'#

Share and enjoy,

Anna & Anniina

* OUP 1996. You should really read his The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (OUP 2008) instead, but we couldn't possibly reuse that as a title for the blog, now could we?

# The Nature of the Judicial Process (Yale University Press 1921), p. 179