BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//132.216.98.100//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.4// BEGIN:VEVENT UID:20260602T174909EDT-7945zZUDUJ@132.216.98.100 DTSTAMP:20260602T214909Z DESCRIPTION:For our first AI and Law talk of the university year\, we welco me Dr Christopher Markou\, Faculty of Law\, University of Cambridge.\n\nTh e conference will take place on Zoom: mcgill.zoom.us/j/81640916943\n\nAbst ract\n\nThe question ‘is law computable?’ immediately recalls the classic jurisprudential question: ‘what is law?’ – a question posed by both legal pragmatists and idealists. For tough-minded pragmatists\, the question ‘wh at is law’ might entail little more than a prediction of whether those in authority will or will not stop a planned action or penalise a completed o ne. This pragmatic approach appeals to business—including the burgeoning L egalTech industry—because efficiency (read: throughput) is the name of the game. After all\, commercial clients don’t concern themselves with esoter ic legal values\, and non-lawyer clients may not even recognise them. Rath er\, the question is really whether some law enforcement body or judge wil l stop\, penalise\, or reward the action. If the law is reframed as the ta sk of predicting behaviours and proactively intervening\, the skills neede d to practice law may become similarly circumscribed\, more formulaic\, an d more readily computable.\n\nBut what does computable law really portend about the future of legal regimes premised on due process\, equality of ar ms\, and fairness?\n \n Thought leaders in the field of computational legal studies or those straddling the line between legal academics and entrepren eurship are quick to tout the abilities of their models to best human expe rts at some narrow game of foretelling the future by doing yesterday’s hom ework. Most often this involves predicting whether the U.S. Supreme Court or European Court of Human Rights\, for instance\, will affirm an appealed judgment based on some set of variables about the relevant jurists. For r eductionist projects in computational law (particularly those that seek to replace cases before them rather than complement legal practitioners)\, t races of the legal process are equivalent to the process itself. If a mach ine produces a judgement that is in some way persuasive\, we should accept it\, goes one refrain.\n\nBut do we not teach our students that in law th e process of exercising legal judgement is inseparable from the resulting judgement? Isn’t the process the exercise?\n \n For enthusiastic LegalTech d evelopers\, the answer is “no”. The words in a complaint and an opinion\, for instance\, are taken to be the essence of the proceeding\, and variabl es gleaned from decisionmakers’ past actions and affiliations determine th eir subsequent ones. In this behaviouristic rendering\, litigants present pages of words to the decisionmaker\, and some set of pages better matches the decisionmaker’s preferences\, and then the decisionmaker tries to wri te a justification of the decision sufficient not to be overruled by highe r levels of appeal. From the perspective of the client\, predictions that are 30 per cent more accurate than a coin flip\, or 20 per cent more accur ate than casually consulted experts\, are not just useful\; they are seen as the future. But there is more to law and legal process than can be comp utationally imputed\, and limits to public trust and acceptance of so-call ed ‘Robot Judges’ and automating ever more aspects of legal process and ju dgement. The human and repetitional toll\, however\, of automating human d iscretional authority ‘out of the loop’ has become acutely clear from the Australian ‘RoboDebt’ fiasco\, the UK's use of a proprietary algorithm to award marks for classes curtailed by COVID\, and Canada’s use of biometric s to assess refugee claims.\n \n This talk will first examine the history of computers and AI in legal contexts\, focusing specifically on the hype ar ound Legal Expert Systems (LES) in the 1980s-1990s to the current generati on of LegalTech applications. Drawing on first-hand accounts from lawyers\ , developers and researchers the talk will survey the technical\, practica l\, and theoretical seeds of failure and what can be learned from it. The talk will then turn to an examination of how concurrent developments in ne uroscience\, physics\, biology and data science are actualising a machinic ontology of the world whereby everything\, including law\, is computable. The talk will conclude with recommendations for research priorities in co mputational legal studies and suggestions for where to draw ‘red lines’ fo r automating legal process or judgement.\n\nAbout the speaker\n\nDr Christ opher Markou is Leverhulme Fellow and Lecturer in the Faculty of Law\, Uni versity of Cambridge\, Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Business Rese arch (CBR)\, Director of the AI\, Law & Society LLM at King’s College Lond on\, and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He writes widely on emer ging technologies policy and governance\, with work featured in outlets su ch as Scientific American\, Newsweek\, and Wired\, among others. Christoph er has been a keynote speaker at the Cheltenham Science Festival\, Cambrid ge Festival of Ideas\, Ted Talks\, and World Congress on Information Techn ology. He is co-editor (with Professor Simon Deakin\, Cambridge) of the fo rthcoming volume 'Is Law Computable? Critical Perspectives on Law + Artifi cial Intelligence' (Hart 2020) and author of the forthcoming monograph Lex Ex Machina: From Rule of Law to Legal Singularity. Twitter: @cpmarkou\n\n The AI and Law Series\n\nThe AI and Law Series is brought to you by the Mo ntreal Cyberjustice Laboratory\; the 91 Student Collective on Technolo gy and Law\; the Private Justice and the Rule of Law Research Group\; and the Autonomy Through Cyberjustice Technologies Project.\n\nThis event is e ligible for inclusion as 1 hour of continuing legal education as reported by members of the Barreau du Québec.\n DTSTART:20201030T170000Z DTEND:20201030T180000Z LOCATION:Zoom: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/81640916943 SUMMARY:Characteristica Universalis Lex: Artificial Intelligence and the Gh osts of LegalTech Past URL:/law/channels/event/characteristica-universalis-le x-artificial-intelligence-and-ghosts-legaltech-past-325258 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR