presence of mind and the future of legal history where the reviewer noted it was thoroughly researched and referenced and made a clear argument, but, as the argument dealt with the historical origins of the modern law, it was questionable whether a generalist journal was the right place for it. The reviewer was doubtful whether a historical explanation of the tensions underlying modern law was of relevance to ageneral readership. That paper was eventually published, but that the question should be thought plausible enough to be included in a review is aworrying statement about what non-legal historians want to see from their colleagues. (Or aworrying statement about the quality of, or lack of time spent performing, reviews.) Such a perspective needs to be confronted, subtly perhaps, but nonetheless confronted. There is space for many voices in academic work, particularly when we all only publish when we have something important to say rather than to meet artificial expectations of publication. And just as legal historians should heed the wisdom of other areas of law in their research, they too should consider how best to persuade the wider audience of the value of legal history. Finally, since we are looking to the future, we might wonder what teaching, learning, and lawyering will be, as that will have knock-on effects on legal history. One Oxford professor has recently said that he sees no future in the traditional lecture, and that blogs and video podcasts are the future, particularly a shorter and more digestible future. If that is what students want, and it comes about, what will it mean for funding models? In Australia, where online teaching prior to the Covid Pandemic from 2019 is much more established, partly as a form of distance learning for universities in smaller cities, funding per student has been one of the key determinants of university structures. Will there be as many academics, being paid as much, when their teaching is increasingly done ‘more efficiently’ and with fewer work hours. A group of former Oxbridge students claimed in 2017 that one iteration of their legal AI program accurately predicted legal decisions at 71 per cent accuracy for the types of cases covered, with the promise of 80–90 per cent accuracy in future, though this does not seem to have materialised.9 Might 9 www.case-crunch.com/, accessed 26Nov. 2017. Having traded under a succession of names – LawBot, Elixirr, and CaseCrunch – it closed in 2018. 47
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