the barrister
#78
EST. 1999
ESSENTIAL READING FOR BARRISTERS 1st October - 21st December 2018
Michaelmas Term issue
w w w. b a r r i s t e r m a g a z i n e . c o m
Guilty or not guilty – can the computer decide? Algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) have become ubiquitous: they track our movements through the GPS in our smartphones; in the health system they help offer diagnostics to cure diseases; they influence our finances by determining our credit rating and they even beat mankind’s greatest chess and Go players. Until relatively recently, the justice system was one of the few areas of public life that seemed impervious to the advance of technology: witness the barristers’ clerks wheeling trolleys laden with legal documents to court or the lack of skype facilities in court rooms. This is all changing however, and even the justice system is slowly integrating AI and algorithms into its practices. What is an algorithm? Is their introduction into the justice system the end of the world as we know it?
Robots in the Court? It is no secret that certain technology companies have set their sights on revolutionising entire industries. From driverless cars to automatic medical diagnosis, some experts in Artificial Intelligence have even gone as far as to predict that within a few decades, no humans will be needed in the workplace. The precise effects of technological change on the justice system remained relatively
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Features
An algorithm, in the simplest terms, is a set of rules and criteria that enable problemsolving, a sequence of instructions telling a computer what to do. The most well-known example of using algorithms within the justice system Christina Blacklaws is probably predictive policing. Law Society President Anyone who has watched The Wire or Minority Report will know what predictive policing entails - anticipating where crime will take place, enabling the police to stop it before, or as, it happens. It depends on sophisticated computer analysis of historical crime data, analysing their time and location to predict where and p.6 when future crimes will occur. unexplored until the current Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett of Malden, delivered the Sir Henry Brooke lecture this year. In his lecture, he predicted that computers would put court interpreters out of a job ‘within a few years.’ In this article, I will take a look at the case for and against his assertion. There are two main arguments used to support the idea that human court interpreters will soon go the way of duelling. In fact, they are basically the same arguments used to predict or justify replacing any professionals with technology. The first of these is simply that professionals are expensive and so some way must be found to reduce the bill for their services. Everyone involved in the legal profession will be familiar with that particular argument. It is the argument used whenever government cuts are made. It is the argument behind every drive p.7 for efficiency and, ironically, it is
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A forum for debate about extradition? By Nick Vamos, Partner at Peters & Peters Solicitors LLP
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Why transparency is more important than ever in the Legal Services Sector – and why we’re still not getting it right By Amanda Hamilton, NALP
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New Manchester Court ruling adds weight to claims banks owe a further £18bn in PPI claims Analysis by Elis Gomer, Barrister at St John’s Buildings
status: the importance 18 Securing of immigration legal aid for children in local authority care
By Kamena Dorling, Group Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Coram
News 3 5
New-look Bar Pro Bono awards announced Privacy International and Liberty fight to unearth police use of intrusive mobile phone monitoring technology
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the barrister Michaelmas Term 2018
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