Notes of the month by The Editor:

The Electronic Lawyer: A recent issue of Punch contains an article entitled ‘The Electronic Lawyer’ by Mr Rupert Townshend-Rose. The article in question refers to reports that ‘electronic engineers are thinking of designing a machine for giving legal advice’.

The source of Mr Townshend-Rose's revelations is, I imagine, the International Mechanisation of Thought Processes Conference which was held at the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington towards the end of last year. Why one body of experts should be engaged in furthering the cause of the mechanisation of thought processes when other experts are continually complaining that television and so forth are already doing this all too efficiently is a little problem which I pose here in passing. Dr Mehl of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris was the exponent at Teddington of the uses of a machine ‘built around an electronic computor’ which could assist in searching for the sources of legal information, in developing legal argument, in preparing the decision of the judge and finally in checking the coherence of the legal solution arrived at.

I may, I hope, without being charged with excessive self-interest, ask what will be left for lawyers to do.

Offensive weapons: Even in parliament itself the question of banning such ‘offensive weapons’ as stilettos and flick-knives has already been considered at almost as great length and with almost as little progress as that other question of banning offensive weapons which is occupying the minds of statesmen at the international level.