Mapping the Issues of Automated Legal Systems: Why Worry About Automatically Processable Regulation?

Abstract

The field of computational law has increasingly moved into the focus of the scientific community, with recent research analysing its issues and risks. In this article, we seek to draw a structured and comprehensive list of societal issues that the deployment of automatically processable regulation could entail. We do this by systematically exploring attributes of the law that are being challenged through its encoding and by taking stock of what issues current projects in this field raise. This article adds to the current literature not only by providing a needed framework to structure arising issues of computational law but also by bridging the gap between theoretical literature and practical implementation. Key findings of this article are: (1) The primary benefit (efficiency vs. accessibility) sought after when encoding law matters with respect to the issues such an endeavor triggers; (2) Specific characteristics of a project—project type, degree of mediation by computers, and potential for divergence of interests—each impact the overall number of societal issues arising from the implementation of automatically processable regulation.

Algorithms in the court: does it matter which part of the judicial decision-making is automated?

“…Much like the others, this attempt aims to describe current technological solutions rather than provide a clear taxonomy. More recently, Whalen ( 2022 ) proposed to classify legal technologies according to their “legal directness” and “legal specificity”, 14 whereas Guitton et al ( 2022a , b ) suggest mapping regulatory technologies along three different dimensions 15 : the project’s aim, divergence of interests between stakeholders, and the degree of human mediation. A different approach was taken by Tamò-Larrieux et al ( 2022 ), who propose the concept of Machine Capacity of Judgment (MCOJ).…”