In 1178, a man named Martin the Narrator stepped forward in Westminster Palace and spoke the first recorded words of the legal profession. He spoke them in Law French — a dialect no commoner could understand. For eight centuries, the law would remain locked behind language, credentials, and cost. But at every turn, reformers fought to open the gates.
We follow Abraham Lincoln reading Blackstone by candlelight in an Illinois cabin, teaching himself law with less than a year of formal schooling — and becoming the greatest lawyer-president in American history. We visit Indiana's bold 1851 constitution, which declared that any citizen of good moral character could practice law. We meet Rosemary Furman, the Florida grandmother who spent her retirement typing $50 divorce papers for people who couldn't afford attorneys — and whose courage helped spark a national conversation about legal access.
We trace how the Magna Carta's promise — "to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice" — inspired generation after generation to demand that law serve everyone. How the Legal Information Institute made federal law free for the first time in 1992. How LegalZoom survived years of legal challenges to reach a $7 billion public offering, proving that millions of Americans wanted affordable legal help and would embrace technology to get it.
Then we arrive at March 2023, when GPT-4 scores in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam — better than nine out of ten human test-takers. For the first time in history, the core competency of legal reasoning became replicable at scale. The dream that Lincoln lived — that legal knowledge belongs to whoever has the determination to claim it — suddenly had a delivery mechanism.
Now Arizona has opened law firm ownership to innovators. Utah is running a regulatory sandbox for legal technology. AI-powered tools are answering legal questions at three in the morning for people who could never afford an attorney. The single mother facing custody finally has an advocate. The small business owner can understand a contract before signing it.
From Westminster Palace to Lincoln's firelight to the AI revolution, this is the story of humanity's longest struggle to make justice accessible — and the extraordinary moment when technology, reform, and determination are finally converging to fulfill that 800-year-old promise.

In 1720 London, Thomas Rawlings operated from a single shop on Fleet Street. With one razor, he would shave your beard, pull your rotted teeth, lance your boils, and amputate your gangrenous limbs. The red and white barber pole still spinning outside modern shops? That's blood and bandages—the universal answer to every question a human body might ask.
This is the story of how that world ended. How humanity discovered that complexity exceeded what any individual could master. And how our response—specialization—is now reshaping artificial intelligence itself.
We begin in 1540 when Henry VIII signed a charter binding barbers and surgeons together. We witness the 1745 divorce when surgeons declared independence. We meet John Hunter, the illiterate Scottish "dunce" who transformed surgery from craft to science with 14,000 specimens. We follow Adam Smith into a pin factory where ten workers produced 48,000 pins per day—240 times more than they could make individually.
We stand on Ford's assembly line. We enter Johns Hopkins where Halsted created the residency system. We arrive at Mission Control on July 20, 1969, where 400,000 specialists coordinated in real time to land humans on the Moon—and a 26-year-old guidance officer's split-second decision, based on specialized knowledge no generalist could possess, saved the mission.
Then we enter Marvin Minsky's office in 1985, where his "Society of Mind" proposed something unsettling: there is no unified intelligence. The mind is a collection of specialized agents, each mindless by itself, producing intelligence through coordination. "You can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself."
The AI community ignored him for forty years—until 2023, when Stanford researchers discovered that large language models suffer from "Lost in the Middle": they forget information in the middle of long contexts. The promise of one giant model doing everything was hitting the same wall that broke the barber-surgeon. The solution? Multi-agent AI systems: research agents, analysis agents, writing agents, fact-checking agents—coordinated specialists achieving what single models cannot.
"No one knows everything; together, they know enough."
From Thomas Rawlings' single razor to AI agent swarms, from Adam Smith's pin factory to Mission Control to microservices architecture, we trace humanity's greatest organizational insight—and watch artificial intelligence rediscover it in real time.

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.