John Horty (attorney)

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John Horty
Born1928 (age 96–97)
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Education Amherst College (BA), Harvard Law School (LLB)
Children John Horty

John F. Horty (born 1928) is an American attorney and a former director of the University of Pittsburgh Health Law Center. He is known for his work in health law, but who also pioneered text-based legal information retrieval. [1]

Career

During the 1950s and 1960s, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law's Health Law Center was an early pioneer in the field now known as computer-assisted legal research (CALR). Attorney and researcher John Horty was astounded by the extent to which the laws governing hospital administration varied from one state to the next across the United States, and began building a computer database to help him keep track of it all. News of Horty's pioneering work at Pitt inspired the Ohio State Bar Association (just across the state line in nearby Ohio) to create its own separate CALR system, the ancestor of the database system known today as LexisNexis. [2] [3] The School of Law moved into their own dedicated facility, the Barco Law Building, upon its opening on the university's main campus in 1976. [4]

References

  1. ↑ Weeks, Lewis E. "JOHN HORTY (In First Person: An Oral History)" (PDF). American Hospital Association . Retrieved 26 September 2025.
  2. ↑ Hershey, Tina Batra; Burke, Donald (February 2018). "Pioneers in Computerized Legal Research: The Story of the Pittsburgh System". Pittsburgh Journal of Technology Law and Policy. 18. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press: 29–39. doi: 10.5195/tlp.2018.212 . ISSN   2164-800X.
  3. ↑ Bourne, Charles P.; Hahn, Trudi Bellardo (2003). A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 . Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp.  229–230. ISBN   978-0-262-02538-6. Available through IEEE Xplore.
  4. ↑ "Barco Law Building". School of Law, University of Pittsburgh.
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