International Focus
Artificial intelligence and Legal Judgement Prediction: a blessing or a threat to the effectiveness of the judicial systems?
MEET YOUR ROBOT JUDGE
Angeliki Konstantara Member of ELSA Athens
Fair administration of justice constitutes a cornerstone to state practice and policies, ensuring the protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms against any public or private infringement. Such administration requires the functioning of effective and reliable legal and judicial systems to fulfil the purpose of social stability and public order. Therefore, there have been successful attempts to integrate artificial intelligence into the judicial process concerning not only civil law cases, such as divorces, but also criminal convictions. AI programs, namely Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP)1 and Self-Attentive Capsule Network (dubbed as SAttCaps)2, are currently very popular in the US and in Europe, leading to the adoption of a legal regulatory framework for the use of AI in judicial decision making. The adoption of such safeguards is of vital importance so as to avoid the risks of technological growth to the detriment of human rights and fundamental freedoms while enhancing the effectiveness of the legal systems. Thanks to the access to legal judgement data, all the three stages of a trial (pre-trial claims, in court debate and judge sentence stage) are simulated online and legal based factors are evaluated with case life-cycle and multi-task learning mechanisms.3 1 Luyao Ma, Yating Zhang, Tianyi Wang, Xiaozhong Liu, Wei Ye1, Changlong Sun, Shikun Zhang, Legal Judgment Prediction with Multi-Stage Case Representation Learning in the Real Court Setting, arXiv:2107.05192v1 2 Yuquan Le , Congqing He, Meng Chen, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He and Bowen Zhou, Learning to Predict Charges for Legal Judgment via Self-Attentive Capsule Network, 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence - ECAI 2020 Santiago de Compostela, Spain 3 Supra note 1, 2
This multi-role representation model seems promising, yet unreliable. However time-saving, cost-effective and unbiased it is considered, it does not guarantee fairness in judgments due to lack of empathy, intuition and perceptiveness.4 Supporters of AI systems seem ignorant of the complexity of the judge’s role in the systematic and teleological interpretation of the law in the light of abstract principles, such as good faith and its application to the evidence submitted. It is certainly no exaggeration to state that the replacement of the human judge by algorithms undermine the substantial role of judicial decision making in shaping morally upright individuals, hence reinforcing social order and solidarity. But what renders AI most problematic for the fair administration of justice is the possible violation of the right to a fair trial due to the automatic adjudication of criminal cases. To be more specific, in accordance with the 6th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States5 as well as with article 6 of the European
4 Sourdin Tania, Judge vs Robot: Artificial Intelligence and Judicial Decision Making, UNSW Law Journal Volume 41(4) 5 Sixth Amendment "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” SYNERGY Magazine | 33
