This post was submitted by myself and Pauline McBride as a letter to the Editor in response to Richard Susskind’s article, ‘I asked ChatGPT to write some laws – this is what happened’ (The Times, 4 April 2024) (non-paywall version of the article available here).
Since it wasn’t published, we’re reproducing it here. This represents our own views only.
Last month I published the COHUBICOL project’s final Research Study on Computational Law, written by Pauline McBride and myself. We focus on both data-driven and code-driven legal technologies (specifically Rules as Code in the latter case), synthesising the primary research we did for the Typology of Legal Technologies with the theory of the Rule of Law, affordance and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
My article ‘ChatGPT and the Future of Law’ has been published in the Journal of The Law Society of Scotland, co-written with (and led by) Pauline McBride.
Last month I had the privilege of being invited to deliver a talk to the Catalan Center for Legal Studies and Specialised Training, a centre for judicial training in Barcelona. The title of talk was ‘AI & the compression of law’, and in it my goal was to debunk the idea of the ‘robot judge’ (always depicted as a glassy white robot figure, either with a blindfold or the scales of justice). Instead, I argued, the worry with the use of AI in law is not the replacement of judges, but rather the subtle reshaping of their activities (and those of other parties in the litigation sphere) by systems whose machine learning underpinnings are geared toward a form of optimisation and relevance that are not necessarily compatible with legal notions of optimality or relevance.
