With a signature where it did not belong, a parchment read again, and four lines scribbled in the margin. Verona is not the backdrop to the congress: it is the place from which we look at law, writing and technology. 1 In 517 AD, a scribe named Ursicinus does something that was not really his place to do: he signs the codex he has copied and adds the date. Thanks to that vanity, we know that the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona has been active at least since 1 August 517: the oldest library in the world still in operation. Not a museum of knowledge, but knowledge still in service. 2 In those rooms rests Codex XV (13). Beneath the writings of Saint Jerome and other Christian authors lies the text of Gaius' Institutiones: the only work of classical Roman jurisprudence to have reached us directly, without the filter of later compilations. For centuries that text was unreadable. In the nineteenth century, philologists pulled it out of the parchment with chemical reagents: they saved the words and damaged the support. Today the same codex can be read again by separating overlapping writings through digital image processing, without the drawbacks of the invasive techniques of the nineteenth century. It is not law that resisted technology; it is technology that saved law. 3 In the same library, an unknown scribe, sometime between the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth, writes four lines in the margin of a codex: Se pareba boves, alba pratalia araba, albo versorio teneba, negro semen seminaba. The oxen are the fingers, the white fields are the page, the plough is the quill, the black seed is the ink. One of the earliest lines of Italian vernacular does not sing of love or battle: it describes a writing device and its output. Whoever writes has always worked with a machine; only those who think it is new are surprised by it. 4 In 1949, writing in the Minnesota Law Review, Lee Loevinger coined the term jurimetrics: alongside jurisprudence, which speculates, an inquiry based on data to draw conclusions about law. He was writing when a computer filled a room and no law firm owned one. He was right seventy-eight years early; in law, an ordinary margin of error. 5 Jurimetrics is Alma Iura's legaltech congress. In Verona, where the past is not preserved but consulted, we look at the years ahead: models and machines, hardware and software, what lawyers will delegate and what they will never be able to delegate. The seed is still black, but the oxen have changed.Jurimetrics starts here.
Ursicinus signs
The palimpsest
The riddle
Loevinger
Why we are here
517 AD
Codex XV
8th-9th c.
1949
5 May 2027