What we would then have done in this way is nothing more than a little sentence analysis – reminiscent of high school lessons – to turn this almost unreadable discourse into a much clearer part of legal rule-making. This type of graphic grammatical analysis was possible in the days of our school with just a piece of chalk and a blackboard – and small classes and class discipline. This could be facilitated today with much more expensive, but immediately enlightening electronic computing. The challenge is to transform an early morning class in a huge conference room into an educational theater center. For student volunteers who come out of school with sharp quantitative skills but jaded verbal and intellectual abilities – distracted by lack of sleep, missed breakfast, morning newspapers, sound pagers and their expected lunch appointments calling any cell phone – this could be just the right dose of electronic entertainment to prevent a mass course based on lectures from slip into educational insignificance. “He writes essays in the PowerPoint presentation!”, a worried exchange student condemned the experiment – with more biting eloquence than common sense, in her so-called “student evaluation”. Yes, if IT can empower a business intelligence system (DSS) ONLY by listing data entries before a final summary reformulation, then that wasn`t the path I was following. In the critical analytical approach to legal argumentation, the entire legal concept contradicts the pure processing of data. But it is certain that this form of SAM is not only in contradiction with the case law. A rigid MAS term that can only be used to enumerate assertive bullets – and add to a conclusive “therefore” – is at odds with the science itself. No one can doubt that we live today in an information-based world that would stop without data processing support systems.
The only caveat here is that the “law” is not simply a data processing system. It is much more essentially a decision-making system. Like any information management organization today, it needs the support of information systems (IS). It would be absurd today not to use such systems to dominate the mountains of documentation associated with legal and judicial decision-making.34 What this essay will attempt to illustrate, however, is that case law itself is a kind of DSS in which entries are not only factual data, but also linguistic qualities and conditions, logical, philosophical, ethical and social arguments that are obscured and perverted by those who, like agency administrators trained exclusively in data processing, seek solutions of “fixed penalties” to any legal problem [see No. 2 above]. If there is an “authority” for legislation, i.e. for the adoption of laws, that “authority” can also be a “source of law” – and it can be both written and unwritten. However, while there may be a recognized rule or set of rules that are “not regulated by law,” there may be evidence that they find “authority” in traditional legal literature, seen as the embodiment of our values, past experiences, or the collective wisdom of those who have been honored for interpreting the law in the past. As we have seen, some rules are rules by order or by explicit “positive” decrees or laws, and some rules are common or reflect the wisdom or repeated deliberate judgment of a tradition. Of course, it is not uncommon for rules arising from customs or traditions to be expressed later in a positive or legal form. This incorporation of the unwritten tradition into the written tradition is part of the attempt to create more certainty about how legal norms will apply – or what legal norms will apply. Legislators who are not comfortable with the idea of uncomfortable sources of law try to include in codified statutes everything they know or have heard of what might arise in the interpretation of what they have written in a particular statute – implicitly excluding any other source of law that they have not absorbed in this way.
For example, when the new Basic Law,65 which had been in force since Hong Kong`s “transfer” of British sovereignty to the People`s Republic of China, recognized not only legal law, but also customary law and equality in force at the time of the handover, the Hong Kong Government and Legislative Council sought to clarify the extent of the continuity of this right since British times.