Brian Flanagan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) - Faculty of Law), Guilherme Almeida (Insper), & Daniel Chen (University of Toulouse Capitole - Toulouse School of Economics) have posted The Rule of Law or the Rule of Robots? Nationally Representative Survey Evidence from Kenya on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
With AI now passing the bar, and with court caseloads worldwide hampering access to justice, there are calls for judges to make use of chatbots to help expedite their work of legal interpretation. Such calls pose an empirical question of the practical difference such a reform might be expected to make. They also pose a normative question: whether judicial reliance on computer generated legal research in deciding litigants’ rights and obligations is consistent with the rule of law. In this paper, we address the normative question by exploring whether the folk concept of law demands that the law’s application be guided by human legal insight only. We report a vignette-based experiment on the acceptability of AI law clerks - assistants whose contribution does not decide what the law says but which may inform the ultimate decision. Collecting nationally representative survey data from Kenya, we find that an AI clerk’s influence on legal outcomes is seen as no less legitimate than that of a human clerk. This result spurs efforts to systematically investigate whether the integration of AI might make justice systems more efficient, accessible, and trustworthy in practice.
Highly recommended.
