Bernard J. Hibbitts

Changing Our Minds: Legal History Meets the World Wide Web

Legal historians have had an ambivalent relationship with new technology. As students and spokespersons of the somewhat-stodgy legal past, our sympathies have predictably been with traditional methods of doing things rather than with the latest and greatest devices of our own age. In the twentieth century we have tended to champion writing and books more than radio, television, and computers. Today we may use new tools to help us create our scholarship and even to help us teach, but like most of our academic colleagues in law and in history we generally employ those tools as extensions of established media instead of exploiting their potential to deploy information and develop ideas in new ways. Our first forays into cyberspace have been consistent with precedent. So far we have tended to use the World Wide Web as a virtual photocopiera technology that allows us to deliver electronic copies of our traditional products (journals, articles, conference papers, syllabi, and so forth)-to a mass audience of scholars, students, and other interested parties. Now this in itself is not insignificant-reaching a worldwide, interdisciplinary public and bringing information and ideas to bear on them at a fraction of the cost of older media is something to be celebrated, not criticized. But before we become self-satisfied, we should consider the technological and indeed metaphysical distance that exists between the Web as legal historians now use it and the Web as it could be used.