Hart Publishing Is Law Computable?: Critical Perspectives on Law and Artificial Intelligence

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science have reignited interest in applying computation to more aspects of law and legal decision-making. The use of algorithmic decision-making (ADM) systems to replicate, and in some cases replace, human judges has, however, given rise to principled concerns about bias, transparency, and the autonomy of law. While AI poses many real societal benefits, scholars suggest that the seductive diversion of the bias problem makes the totalisation of AI and ADM contingent on solving computational puzzles and ethics washing away hard questions and dubious ideas. Not more fundamental questions about the compatibility of autonomous systems with the rule of law, deliberative democracy, and ultimately: should we be building them at all? In this timely and unique volume a group of leading international scholars address some of the most pernicious questions raised by the growing ubiquity of AI as well as the longer-term and path-dependent implications of replacing human decision-making with ADM and so-called Robot Judges. Some predict that sustained advances in AI will culminate in a legal singularitya hypothetical point where the functional capabilities of AI vastly exceed those of human judges and lawyers. In the post-legal singularity world the law is said to exist in perpetual equilibrium between facts and norms. However, the legal singularity is also a proposal for eliminating juridical reasoning as the basis for dispute resolution and the allocation of rights, responsibilities and power. What does computable law mean for the autonomy, authority, and legitimacy of the legal system? Will this post-legal singularity world even need human judges and lawyers?