I have spent decades of my life writing and creating

The swan song of the Compendium

At the end of the 1970s, the English new wave band The Buggles sang the famous line that video had killed the radio star. Their song looked back with affection at the simple magic of listening to the radio, when voices and music on their own, could appeal to the imagination. Then pictures arrived, and some of that mystery began to fade. In a way, the song felt like an early warning. It spoke to a change that would only grow bigger over the years, as one wave of technology followed another and eventually brought us to today’s touch button world.

In much the same way, artificial intelligence stormed into our libraries and unplugged the reading lamps.

I have spent decades of my life writing and creating a Case Law of Mauritius: A Compendium. This was a massive, all-in-one summary of human knowledge, and to me, the ultimate academic flex. I worked alone, often very late at night and early in the morning – when my children were asleep. I juggled an impossible calendar of being the best wife and mother I could be, whilst maintaining a full-time career at the bar. The exercise of delving into the history of 160 years of jurisprudence was relentless but so rewarding. This was a labour of love couched in perseverance and academic challenge which came at the cost of considerable personal sacrifice. It involved tons of reading, manual cross referencing and intellectual application.

It was meant to be a gift for posterity and supposed to last forever. But as most things in life, this was not meant to be.

I still hear at the back of my mind, the disheartened and embittered words of Edwin Venchard QC, when I followed in his footsteps to publish the laws of Mauritius. He warned me against putting too much energy in local publications on account of the smallness of the market and the inevitable disappointment that would ensue with what he colourfully described as the “ti l’esprit” of the profession, who believed that local legal publication was a gold mine. I did not fully understand him then – and I persevered. But now I know exactly what he meant – and he was spot on.

And perhaps this is where nostalgia begins to speak most eloquently. There was a quiet beauty in the old struggle of manual legal research, a kind of patience and intimacy that made the journey as meaningful as the answer. The real brilliance of the Compendium was that it allowed lawyers to wander through legal history in a human, familiar way. There can be no substitute for flicking through old books , searching for an ordinary authority and suddenly coming across a 1920s reference, pausing over it, and finding there the seed of an unexpected and clever line of argument. AI does not wander in that way. It moves directly from question to answer. We can now ask for a case, and the machine delivers it so quickly that we may forget the quiet pleasure of searching, finding, and slowly earning the answer.

The difficulty is not that the information has disappeared. If anything, it is more protected and more accessible than ever. What has changed is the feeling around it. We look at these remarkable AI models much as people once looked at television in 1979, full of wonder at the new magic before them, yet quietly sad for the radio stars who had spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. We cannot turn the clock back, and perhaps we should not try. The software has already carried us into another age. Yet the physical volumes will hopefully always have a warm, dignified place on the shelves of law practices, not only as books, but as witnesses to devotion, discipline, and care. AI can place the legal facts before us in an instant, but it cannot recreate the years of labour, love, and human soul that made those facts feel truly earned in the Compendium.

And now comes the time to say goodbye to the Compendium. It has served its time, and its relevance is now seriously questioned. And as everything in life, it must respectfully bow to its succession – the touch button age.