A presentation by Prof. Frank Pasquale, Advisor at the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC). This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
At present, the commercial appeal of automated legal systems rests on three pillars: speed, scale, and preference satisfaction. However, for many parts of the U.S. legal system, there is a common sense that their translation into computation would be inappropriate. This concern about premature or unwise automation has many facets. A “legal process” account of the rule of law hinges on the availability of human review, appeals, and dialogic interaction.
The simultaneous existence of malleability of legal systems, and constitutive practices within them, leads to a two-level consideration of a) what aspects of a liberal legal order are crucial, and b) for those that are crucial, what is lost when the step is either partially or fully automated. Within a sphere of human activity like a liberal legal order, some patterns of action are merely instrumental to achieving ends, while others are essential, or constitutive: the activity should no longer even be considered part of a liberal legal order when the practice ceases. Administrative processes that are simply incidental and instrumental to the legitimate resolution of a case are primed for automation, and it is there to which legal technology should (and often does) turn its attention first. Other practices by persons, for persons, are essential and intrinsically important, and properly resist being converted into machine-readable code. Distinguishing between incidental and constitutive, or instrumentally and intrinsically important aspects of law, should be a recognized part of bounding and guiding legal automation.
Frank Pasquale is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. He currently serves on the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises the President and the National AI Initiative Office at the Department of Commerce. He is an internationally recognized and prolific scholar whose work has addressed the regulation of technology in several contexts. His 2015 book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press), has been recognized as a landmark study in information law. Pasquale’s latest book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Harvard University Press, 2020) analyzes the law and policy influencing the adoption of AI in varied professional fields.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.