| Sumario: | The article cites a study reporting the application of an information retrieval system to the field of school law. The implications of this study extend to other areas of education and, as well, to all fields affected by the explosion of knowledge. School law is an especially appropriate educational field for the application of computerized information retrieval systems. Given these considerations, the importance of a computerized system for the retrieval of legal information needs no elaboration. The purpose of the investigation described here was to test the utility of Information Retrieval techniques for answering questions of school law. The documents retrieved by both the computer and the attorney were evaluated through informal and formal methods. However, more formal means of evaluation were also used. These results reveal that the computer is an invaluable tool for dealing with questions of school law, and the investigation also suggests other possible applications of the computer to document analysis. The computer, it has been shown, can answer questions concerning the existence of laws more quickly and accurately than a professional lawyer searching indexes and statutes by hand. Yet, the computer provides no interpretations and makes no decisions. On the other hand, this investigation suggests that the technique of analyzing verbal material with a computer has great potential both within and without the legal field.
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