Predicting Justice: From Sheep Entrails to AI Courtrooms

September 17, 1862. Antietam Creek runs red with the blood of ten thousand men. A musket ball tears through Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s neck, missing his carotid artery by the width of a human hair. As he lies dying in a Maryland farmhouse, watching confident men die randomly beside him, the certainties of his youth bleed out along with his blood.
Thirty-five years later, Holmes will stand before a Boston lecture hall and deliver the most influential legal essay ever written: "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."
But Holmes's insight was ancient. For four thousand years before that musket ball, humans facing the mysteries of justice had sought the same thing: prediction.
• The Baru Priests of Babylon (1766 BCE): Reading sheep livers for King Hammurabi, maintaining humanity's first legal database on clay tablets
• The Oracle Bones of Shang China: Pyromancers carving questions into ox scapula, tracking predictions against outcomes across 150,000 fragments
• The Pythia at Delphi: A woman breathing volcanic gases, running the ancient world's most sophisticated intelligence network disguised as divine prophecy
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Three times wounded, three times within inches of death, emerging to declare that law is prediction, not principle
• Lee Loevinger (1949): The Minneapolis lawyer who coined "jurimetrics" fifty years before anyone would listen
• Lex Machina: Stanford researchers building the first systematic database of judicial behavior
• The AI Revolution: Algorithms achieving 79% accuracy predicting European Court of Human Rights decisions
The methods changed. The hunger did not.
In ancient Babylon, they consulted entrails. In Shang China, they read crack patterns in heated bone. In Greece, they paid handsomely for the cryptic utterances of a woman breathing ethylene. In our time, machine learning analyzes millions of judicial decisions to identify patterns no human could perceive.
"Certainty generally is illusion," Holmes wrote, "and repose is not the destiny of man."
The oracle endures. The forms change. The need remains.
This is the story of humanity's oldest legal question—and the technologies we've built to answer it.