Legal Systems and Artificial Intelligence

Project Outline

This project focuses on judicial decision making as a core feature of legal systems, and, examines the possibilities, risks, and limitations of its digitisation and automation. We aim to develop (1) foundational technologies for computing law and modeling legal reasoning in ways that will facilitate the introduction of AI into legal systems, (2) the creation of future scenarios for the implementation of AI in law, and (3) a set of ethical guidelines for regulating the use of AI in dispute resolution. In the first phase, we will develop legal reasoning models and algorithms using a dataset of British court decisions, and verify their accuracy using a variety of AI techniques which will enable us to compare the models with features of actual legal systems. In Japan an obstacle to AI development in law up to now is that there are fewer disputes brought to court and hence a smaller number of judgments than in countries such as the UK and USA, while fewer court materials are digitized. Using our UK-based research as a starting point, we aim to address this problem by obtaining the support of Japanese courts and government officials for the application of AI methods to Japanese legal materials, and then to conduct comparative research between Japan and the UK.

Investigators

Participating and Cooperating Organizations