Collaborative Law: A game designed to incubate
legal theories in breaking issues
Colin McRoberts
Litigation to determine questions of law regarding new technical
issues is extremely expensive and time consuming. Moreover, jurists
and interested parties often are forced to develop legal theories
on the fly, adapting standing doctrine to new technical issues
as they arise. Encouraging conservative courts to apply these
theories can be difficult, as judges and juries often do not have
an effective comprehension of technical issues and may be hesitant
to make important declarations of law without a body of supporting
work.
I propose to develop a system for providing such a body of work
that would be more comprehensive and focused than traditional
accumulation of academic journal articles and much faster than
waiting for precedent to accrue. Websites such as Slashdot have
had great success in building online communities of experienced
and talented people who are capable of donating sometimes considerable
amounts of time to projects that grab their attention. These contributions
are often wasted, though, as individual posts get buried under
a flood of follow-up, and threads are archived and rarely seen
again. I would like to design a collaborative game to harness
the experience and interest of technical and legal experts and
interested laypeople in order to test legal theories, establish
a collection of documented comments and research, and heighten
the visibility of salient legal issues.
I believe that the simplest way to do this would be to create
a website that acted in some ways as a moot court, and in others
as a directed game. By setting three or four important legal questions
that have yet to be addressed by the courts, and inviting lawyers,
law students, industry professionals, and lay people to affiliate
themselves with one side of the debate or another, it should be
possible to encourage these people to donate their time and talent
to developing the question.
Rather than establishing a simple message board, which would be
difficult to index and relatively hard for third parties to use,
I believe that a directed game would encourage players to produce
research trails, briefs, and comments that could be archived and
indexed as a chronological record of how the involved community
approached the problem. Rather than pretending to reach a definitive
solution on any of the questions the end product of the game would
be an index of the documents produced and a summary of how the
problem was tackled by the players, perhaps with an eye to the
players' backgrounds (legal, technical, or lay) and how their
perspective influenced their approach. This might be best accomplished
through email, web postings, or a software package designed to
track postings and their successive comments.
Pitching the game to law schools, universities, and firms as
a team activity might encourage these institutions to encourage
their members to contribute, and allowing players to self organize
into teams would allow scalability of the project. Opposing teams
would trade arguments and concepts, encouraging each side of the
issue to refine its arguments and develop new questions salient
to the original topic. Eventually, it might be possible for the
playing community to produce its own problems and manage its own
progress.
The problems presented to these teams could range over a wide
selection of issues and styles. It might be most effective to
have problems from different fields; an actual case, a hypothetical
case, and a broad issue running simultaneously would allow for
a large number of participants and test the theory behind the
game in different contexts. If parties in actual litigation are
willing, contributions could be made to the litigation on both
sides of the aisle, allowing for immediate feedback into the practicability
and usefulness of users' product.
The product I envision for the semester is a collection of three
to five contemporary legal problems that would benefit from a
considered and in-depth analysis, a website or other dialogue
system that would allow players to contribute, and an organizational
plan for documenting progress. The end result of the entire project
would be, hopefully, a collection of analyses and comments tracing
the development of a legal question through the competitive back-and-forth
of opposing teams of players. Hopefully, this would allow legal
theories to be tested in a low-cost environment without the expense
of litigation, which would allow for more cohesive theories of
attack when actual litigation is tackled.
Read the final project report, Six/Four
and File Sharing: Collaborative Debate.
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