The American Association of American Law Schools Jurimetrics Committee Report on Scientific Investigation of Legal Problems

Abstract

The 1961 report of the Jurimetrics Committee of the American Association of American Law Schools describes the interests of the committee in investigating 1. the possible usefulness of programmed self-instructional materials in legal education, 2. the use of symbolic logic as an analytic tool for detecting and controlling syntactic ambiguity in written legal documents, 3. the possible use of electronic computers and other methods of automatic data retrieval as aids in doing legal research, 4. the utility of semantics (including general semantics and recent development in linguistics) for improving communication in law, 5. the quantitative analysis of various aspects of the legal decision process, and 6. other implications of developments in science for law. This note is intended to be a brief explanation of some of those interests.