Alex Reiss-Sorokin, Davis Center and Institute for Advanced Study Postdoctoral Fellow, will speak on “From Research to Search: Legal Research Technologies, 1964-1980.”

This talk interrogates how lawyers who traditionally relied on books came to use and trust computers for their work. I focus on the evolution of the Ohio Bar Automated Research (OBAR) System, a local legal research system developed for small Ohio firms, into LexisNexis, a national service better suitable for Big Law's needs (and pockets). In the process of developing the OBAR/Lexis system, normative disagreements about legal expertise or access to justice were recast as technical decisions. By 1973, as the control over the system migrated from Ohio to New York City, legal research was stripped of its social and political implications and replaced with legal “search,” a stand-alone exercise in information retrieval. The talk also examines the developers' and users' competing notions of trust and credibility, tracing the “techniques of trust” that enabled the spread and ascent of OBAR/Lexis.

To attend virtually, contact Kim Murray.

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