The following appears in a US legal database: “”My name is Barry Krusch, and I am president of an organisation called Americans for a Constitutional Convention. üWhy We Need an New Constitution@ was written to provide a summary of the defects and obsolescences of the Constitution. This essay is the product of over six months’ extensive research, involving the analysis of dozens of books, law review articles, historical documents, debates printed in the Congressional Record, and newspaper clippings. The essay itself took over 200 hours to write, and is the most compact and complete document of its kind this author has yet seen.”
Barry is obviously very impressed with his own essay.
Essentially, the essay points to a military-industrial complex in the US that corrupts members of the House of Representatives by pork-barrelling and blackmail. The essay itself is less impressive than by the fact its author wrote it and put on a public database.
The database, the Legal Forum in the Compuserve, is a delightful explosion of all the things we know, love and detest about the American legal system.
Barry’s essay was just one of the gems.
Anyone with a computer and modem can log in at $18 an hour (payable by giving your credit card number). The phone call is a local one. Information about the service can be obtained on 008 023158.
It has an immense number of databases of every topic under the sun: medical, boating, fishing, UK papers, biorhythms and so on. Much of it is rubbish because users can put in what they like and send messages to each other. But there is an extraordinary amount of useful material, including US Supreme Court judgments in the legal forum. None of this is very new; it is a continuation of information overload.
It is great fun. I saw an explosion of electronic mail after someone sought some advice on how to get out of jury service. Most of the legal forum members are attorneys of one sort or another. Typically they supported doing jury service but would defend to bottom of the client’s bank account his right to get out of serving on one.
Someone had drafted a Bill of Responsibilities to counter the Bill of Rights. It was all very serious stuff. Free speech was countered with a responsibility not to denigrate others’ beliefs. The right to bear arms drew a responsibility not to carry sub-machineguns through suburban shopping centres and so one.
Another article explained that America does not have too many lawyers. In fact it has fewer per head than Japan. I have downloaded this for fodder for a later column. Compuserve lets the user download material (usually in a compacted form) into the user’s computer.
The service lets you answer back. In computer speak it is “”interactive”. I could, for example, dump last week’s scintillatingly learned article on the ACT judiciary into the database so the million or so (mainly US subscribers) who are interested in such things could read and comment on it, just like Barry’s essay on the Constitution.
That is one of the drawbacks with Compuserve. The US has more modems and computers than any nation on earth. So it has more Compuserve subscribers. The market-driven cultural imperialism of the US will inevitably spread into the computer database medium. Because it has som many users, it is cheaper than purely Australian databases. The Australian legal database is four times the cost per hour, for example. It is also harder to use.
Two elements of the cultural imperialism will not go astray in Australia. It will raise the quantity if not the quality of debate, not just in legal matters, but across all fields.
Secondly, the freedom of expression allowed technically by such a service will inevitably translate into a practical freedom. People will say what they like about the people in power. Inevitably, the defamation law will not be able to keep up. There may be one or two cases, but they will not have the intended suppressing effect that defamation actions have on media outlets in Australia.
People love to talk, especially about other people. And they use hearsay, opinion and bias all the time. They are unstoppable: a glance through the electronic mail in Compuserve is testimony to that.