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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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