Page 142 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Media as Mathematics - Calculating Justice 133

a reduction to a mathematical formula‖. His paper thus begins to contest a
range of epistemological and discursive issues consequent to the methods it
adopts. Yet finally he regards these questions as supplementary or theoretical,
rather than essential, to the truth claims of its outcomes. Any opportunity for
reflexive and critical institutional strategy to do with law reform seems to
justify pragmatically the apparent jurisprudential limitations of the particular
methods employed.
Is it possible to revisit incomplete research projects, decades old, to
produce insights of contemporary interest? Some themes of legal realism
remain relevant today: questions about the nature of deontic and traditional
verbal reasoning and rules; inquiry about the performative, habitual and
symbolic nature of legal decisions; inquiry about alternative methods of the
representation of logic, including mathematical notation; the complex
indeterminacy of social and individual behaviour; and most pertinent to today,
concern for the need for media and creative tools of reasoning in legal
domains. Kort is concerned with the observation of actual communicative
events and individual behaviour and he seeks reforms to social practice from
an identification of the processes of individual reasoning. His own case study
can become a pilot study for issues and processes that have become
increasingly common with the emergence of new media.
Kort‘s work argues implicit acknowledgment for his non-verbal inferential
analytic in existing verbal statements. ―Factors‖ are identifiable and implicit in
court opinions, in a verbal attempt to explain patterns for consistent judgement
about petitions before it. Peirce would say there is an implicit mathematical or
diagrammatic logic in statutory verbal language, as iterated in judicial
opinions of judgments: reasoning will be better comprehended if this pattern is
clarified. Kort quotes Bates vs. Illinois - ―when the gravity of the crime and
other factors such as the age and education of the defendant, the conduct of the
court or the prosecuting officials, and the complicated nature of the offence
charged and the possible defence thereto‖ as an identification of factors that
might ―render criminal proceedings without counsel so apt as to result in
injustice as to be fundamentally unfair.‖
However, Kort, like Peirce, would never envisage automatism based on
numerical signs. Quantitative techniques cannot substitute for verbal and
human decisions. However he spoke of ―logic machine‖ and graphical
reasoning tools, Peirce prophesied autonomous artificial intelligence only to
discount it [Peirce, 2.56]. In the same way, Kort does not seek automatic
judgments from the wider use of his techniques; however poorly conceived
and explained, his research remains part of a behavioural, sociological