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Artificial Intelligence and the Law from a Research Perspective
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Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in awareness by the public and the legal community of the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and other computational techniques in the legal system and in legal practice. For example, several articles in the Fall 2017 issue of The SciTech Lawyer expressed fears that the rise of AI threatens to reduce legal jobs and to substitute unaccountable and opaque algorithmic processes for human judgment and due process.
As a researcher in the field of AI and law since the late 1980s, I am happy to see increased interest in AI on the part of the legal community. However, my perception is that a distorted view of the accomplishments, capabilities, and promises of AI has emerged in popular perception. This article will briefly review the history of AI and law research, the focus of current research, and my view of the most important future directions. I will discuss the perceived dangers of AI in the law in light of these observations.
First Generation AI and Law
The term "artificial intelligence" was coined by John McCarthy in a storied 1956 Dartmouth Symposium.1 The primary focus of early AI research was logical reasoning, e.g., proving theorems of logic,2 playing checkers,3 and deducing the molecular structure of chemical samples.4 To the pioneers of AI and law, the logical character of legal rules and arguments suggested that these new computational techniques for logical inference would be well suited for automated legal reasoning. The ability of logic-based systems to provide explanations for their conclusions by displaying the sequence of logical steps justifying the conclusion was a particular strength of this approach.5
Early prototypes were developed in tax,6 torts,7 and immigration8 that applied legal rules represented in the form of computable logic to facts (also represented in logical form) to...