From Stone Tablets to Mobile Phones: The Four Acts of Law
And how FiscalNote aims to create a fifth act
Last week, while remarking on FiscalNote’s Series C milestone, I made mention to the evolution of law — and the advancements computing has brought to the space. A more detailed look at this topic reveals how society has driven — and has been driven by — the existence of law.
Law often molds the way a society operates, but in turn that society will mold the law to suit its needs. Governance had gone through several leaps in its maturation. Today we stand at the forefront of a revolutionary moment in law, as digitization makes it more transparent and accessible than ever. It truly has come a long way.
Act I: Stone Tablets
About 5,000 years ago something interesting happened. It wasn’t glamorous, nor was it extraordinary. As human society began to slowly form into villages, then city-states, then entire empires, humans began organizing themselves based on codes of conduct in the first known instances of law. Transcribed onto stone tablets, usually written in story formats and invoking a divine authority, these tablets are the start of a tradition as old as society itself — writing and publishing the law.
The earliest of these were found among the Ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia and its tradition continued in city centers in Ancient Babylon. Hammurabi’s Code, for instance, covered almost 300 laws, transcribed around 1780 BC. And for thousands of years, human society revolved around these stone tablets as the basis of law.
Act II: Law Gets Organized
Much of this changed thousands of years later, around 800 BC, during the development of the Greco-Roman system of law. Justice began to revolve around actual laws (acts tied to consequences and processes for justice) as modern political systems began to see their first forms in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire, in particular, since its inception, stored mass amounts of laws in large Roman libraries throughout the Empire. While many were burned in fires in the early first century AD, the legal system was notorious for its adherence to processes and its rigidness. The amount of publishing and research around the law was unprecedented in human history.
Several hundred years later, after the division of the Roman Empire, the evolution of law advanced to a point where the law was finally formally organized and indexed. The creation of the Justinian Code was a major step forward in human history as Roman Law was published in Codex format for the first time in history. These books marked the first of the two major legal systems in the Western world — Civil Law.
Meanwhile, on the northern side of Europe, another form of law was developing in the United Kingdom. Justice, which was normally delivered in trial by jury of peers reviewing norms and customs, came to an end when Henry the II created a unified system of common law courts at the national level — where juries would make decisions based on local knowledge and customs. While this came at conflict with the Church, the concept of stare decisis (precedent) began to form. When the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, the second form of law in the Western world was cemented in the Common Law system.
Act III: The Legal Publishing Industry
Then in 1440, everything changed. While the law was previously confined to academics (and monks during the Middle Ages) due to the high costs of reproduction, the invention of the printing press would forever change the speed of communication and delivery. Laws began to get published in mass quantities and the study of law became much more mainstream.
For instance, the English Common Law was organized and mass produced for the first time in Blackstone’s Law Commentary in 1765. These four volumes, distilled and revised many times, became the ruling law of the American colonies.
Here in the United States, after the Revolutionary War, the United States began to get heavily engaged in the process of creating modern American law. In order to stem the costs from private companies, Congress created the Government Printing Office to publish laws across the country, employing hundreds (growing to thousands) of people in this practice.
By the late 19th century in the age of robber barons, entrepreneurs began to pop up and find niches that the government themselves could not fill. One of these entrepreneurs, John Briggs West, would come to found the West Publishing Company in 1872, summarizing and indexing the key decisions of the Supreme Court of Minnesota (in Egan, MN where West is still based today over 100 years later). Thousands of competitors would emerge through the next several decades including the infamous LexisNexis and Congressional Quarterly.
Act IV: The Information Age
All these developments bring us to today. The last 40 years have seen an unprecedented amount of change in the way humans process and publish information. From the invention of “virtual memory” in the Atlas Computer in 1962 to the creation of the modern personal computer in the mid 1970s, humans now have powerful tools to structure and organize mass amounts of information.
When the Internet and the modern browser were released in the early 1990s, society would never be the same. You could now access information around the world, in real-time (or as much as your dial-up modem would let you).
With Moore’s Law advancing the power of computers every year, large scale computing power has suddenly become incredibly cheap in the last 10 years. And the invention of the modern mobile device now puts the power of that computing in the palm of your hand.
So where does that leave us in 2016?
Today, the law has become incredibly complex (and shows no signs of stopping). The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, now contains more than 103 million words. Think about that: you used to be able to fit the entire law of the global United Kingdom into four books.
And today’s organization is inherently global. Take, for instance, Uber and Lyft. As they aim to globalize, they face an unprecedented amount of legal challenges in every major nation around the world.
So in a global society with wearable devices, machine learning, self-driving cars, and mobile devices, we are truly living in the future. And yet the law is very much stuck in the past.
In 2013, three friends from high school thought this had to change. In a Motel 6 in Silicon Valley, they thought of a platform to bring the law into the 21st Century and take on some of the folks that have been in the market since the late 1800s.
The next stage of law involves dynamically-updating, real-time information aggregation; predictive analytics; automated classification and indexing; mobile access to information; international consolidation; and instant collaboration and communication. The legal system that FiscalNote sees is a far cry from the stone tablets that defined human civilization 5,000 years ago.
That is the mission of FiscalNote. We are creating Act V in the publishing of law in the modern world and inventing the future of law as we know it.
