It was written as the doctoral dissertation of James Popple under the supervision of Robin Stanton, Roger Clarke, Peter Drahos, and Malcolm Newey.
[8] A full technical report of the expert system,[9] and a book[3] further detailing its development and testing have also been published.
It was designed to provide advice in areas of case law that have been specified by a legal expert using a bespoke specification language.
It derives its name from Shyster: a slang word for someone who acts in a disreputable, unethical, or unscrupulous way, especially in the practice of law and politics.
Although case-based reasoning possesses an advantage over rule-based systems by the elimination of complex semantic networks, it suffers from intractable theoretical obstacles: without some further theory it cannot be predicted what features of a case will turn out to be relevant.
To this end SHYSTER can be seen to adopt and expand upon nearest neighbor search methods used in pattern recognition.
SHYSTER was evaluated under five headings: its usefulness, its generality, the quality of its advice, its limitations, and possible enhancements that could be made to it.
[12] Some academics believe future digital rights management systems may become sophisticated enough to permit exceptions to copyright law.
[13] To this end SHYSTER's attempt to model "authorization [sic]" in the Copyright Act can be viewed as pioneering work in this field.
The main contexts in which the issue has arisen are analogous to permitted exceptions to copyright currently prevented by most digital rights management technologies: "home taping of recorded materials, photocopying in educational institutions and performing works in public".
This intention was eventually realised by Thomas O’Callaghan, the creator of SHYSTER-MYCIN: a hybrid legal expert system first presented at ICAIL '03, 24–28 June 2003 in Edinburgh, Scotland.