legal history•introduction • matthew dyson such artificial intelligence be the equivalent of a book index or searching a pdf instead of having to read an entire article or book? Will it help law undergraduates learn basic skills? Or will it reduce demand for lawyers and legal training? What other changes await that we have not even considered? What must legal history be in order to survive? Perhaps it will prove one of the last areas where AI will have the skills and judgement to succeed? This leads us to consider is what changes will come to how legal historians do their work. One fundamental shift has been the role of technology. At the moment, legal history still features a significant portion of editing and compilation of manuscripts and texts. At some point in the not-too-distant future, that basic groundwork will be done, as it has been done for the key texts of Roman law. This change is happening now. It is only a few years since scholars who wanted to search the Hansard records of Parliamentary debates had to do so by hand, spending weeks in the Parliamentary Archives inWestminster, a feat now achieved online in a matter of hours. A couple of decades ago I was being encouraged to use online resources rather than just rely on books in the library; today, I have to remind students that just because a book is not online does not mean they do not have to read it. The hope must be that once the work of presentation and indexing is done, the quality of legal analysis might then leap forward and be available to more scholars, regardless of where they are located. However, this movement towards accessibility has led to the very sources we use, and the expectations of our use of them, to expand dramatically. Since more sources are now accessible, we are expected to master more of them. We also risk losing some of the archival skills, since such work might seem less attractive in the face of the appeal of the interesting and now accessible substantive work to be done. We might even be losing the originals, certainly modern libraries are asking why they should keep or buy hard copies of law journals when everything is available online. Furthermore, 48 Who will legal historians be?
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