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Book Review

Pamela N. Gray Articial Legal Intelligence, Darmouth, Aldershot, England,

1997, (ISBN 1-85521-266-8)

I had been told by several people that Arti.cial Legal Intelligence by

Pamela N. Gray1 was not that interesting or at best controversial. Indeed,

the book is di.erent from what normally is written in the .eld of AI & Law

and belongs to the postmodern deconstructionist literature of the 1980s and

1990s.2 At .rst glance it might appear somewhat mystical with chapters

named ‘Holistic legal intelligence’, ‘Cyclic paradigms of legal intelligence’

and ‘Jurisprudential systems: survival jurisprudence’, and sections called

‘intra-strata and inter-strata choice’, ‘river logic’, and ‘virtual reality of legal

spheres’. A closer look reveals that underneath the mysterious surface lies a

rich, well-documented sea of interesting material. To give just one example,

I was pleasantly surprised to .nd out (p. 221) that my famous fellow

country man Johan Huizinga in Chapter IV of Homo Ludens deals with

lawsuits as games.3