ABSTRACT
The jurisprudential literature is replete with metaphors of law. Glenn Harlan Reynolds proposes the metaphor of constitutional law as a dynamical system evolving according to the laws of mathematical chaos. Newer artificial intelligence (AI) approaches provide new, possibly more robust metaphorical conceptions of law. Law may be seen as an unsupervised connectionist network, as a hybrid classical-connectionist AI system, or as an embodied, situated robot intelligence. The metaphors of law as connectionist system, embodied robot, and quilt attempt to capture some of the significant qualities of law. Law and society resonate like a pair of damped, driven, coupled mechanical oscillators. Underlying the metaphor of law as a connectionist network is the mind-machine metaphor. The mind-machine metaphor perspective tends to hide the moral and ethical aspects of law, as well as the question of the source or sources of the law’s legitimacy. The network metaphor sees law as a gigantic mind-machine attempting constantly to learn and to improve itself.
