The Emperor's New Expert System

Leith, Philip

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2230.1987.tb02568.x

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…This was one of the sticking points in the 1980's debates about legal automation between Susskind and Leith (Leith 1987;Susskind 1987). The contention concerned whether there were any areas where the cases were "clear enough," such that rules for them could be encoded in an expert system (as Susskind hoped), or whether even in those areas, rules were dogged by a penumbra of doubt (as Leith argued), such that you can never know when a difficult case might crop up.…”

Section: Individual Justice May Be Unequally Distributedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such systems were first introduced by Layman Allen in 1956 (the very year the term “artificial intelligence” was first introduced at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project) (Allen 1956). Further work continued in the 1970's (Buchanan & Headrick 1970; McCarty 1976), but the topic gained prominence with the rise of “expert systems” in the 1980's (Leith 1986; Leith 1987; Susskind 1987; Leith 2016). Had they been successful in validly deriving legal judgments from encoded rulesets, adherents of Dicey, NPM, and administrative rule‐making might welcome such systems, and have no qualms about their inability to replicate whatever is supposedly involved in human discretion.…”

Section: How the Rules‐versus‐discretion Debate Enters Into The Automation‐versus‐human Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

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Human Judgment in algorithmic loops: Individual justice and automated decision‐making

Binns

2020

Regulation & Governance

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Arguments in favor of tempering algorithmic decision making with human judgment often appeal to concepts and criteria derived from legal philosophy about the nature of law and legal reasoning, arguing that algorithmic systems cannot satisfy them (but humans can). Such arguments often make implicit appeal to the notion that each case needs to be assessed on its own merits, without comparison to or generalization from previous cases. This article argues that this notion of individual justice can only be meaningfully served through human judgment. It distinguishes individual justice and considers how it relates to other dimensions of justice, namely consistency and fairness / nondiscrimination. Finally, it identifies and discussess two challenges: first, how individual justice can be accommodated alongside other dimensions of justice in the socio-technical contexts of humans-in-the-loop; and second, how inequities in individual justice may result from an uneven application of human judgment in algorithmic contexts.

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Section: Individual Justice May Be Unequally Distributedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: How the Rules‐versus‐discretion Debate Enters Into The Automation‐versus‐human Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Human Judgment in algorithmic loops: Individual justice and automated decision‐making

Binns

2020

Regulation & Governance

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“…This could be seen as a version of the common bootstrapping problem in legal automation (Hildebrandt, 2013;Leenes, 2003); namely, that determining which cases require more or less human judgement, may itself require human judgement. This was one of the sticking points in the 1980's debates about legal automation between Susskind and Leith (Leith, 1987;Susskind, 1987). The contention concerned whether there were any areas where the cases were 'clear enough', such that rules for them could be encoded in an expert system (as Susskind hoped), or whether even in those cases, rules were dogged by a penumbra of doubt (as Leith argued), such that you can never know when a difficult case might crop up.…”

Section: Individual Justice May Be Unequally Distributedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further work continued in the 1970's (e.g. (Buchanan and Headrick, 1970;McCarty, 1976)), but the topic gained prominence with the rise of 'expert systems' in the 1980's (Leith, 2016(Leith, , 1987(Leith, , 1986Susskind, 1987). Had they been successful in validly deriving legal judgements from encoded rulesets, adherents of Dicey, NPM, and administrative rule-making might welcome such systems, and have no qualms about their inability replicate whatever is supposedly involved in human discretion.…”

Section: Are Rules Preferable To Discretion? and Can They Be Coded?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such alternative systems have been pursued at various junctures over decades of work at the intersection of law and AI, which aims to model legal reasoning using a range of different computational techniques beyond the aforementioned rule-based and expert systems. In part this was prompted by a departure from early work on legal expert systems which focused on a rather limited set of legal theory -the 'Oxford school' of analytic jurisprudence of Dworkin and Hart, as in (Leith, 1987;Susskind, 1987).…”

Section: Even If Discretion Is Required Is It Uniquely Human?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Human Judgement in Algorithmic Loops; Individual Justice and Automated Decision-Making

Binns

2019

SSRN Journal

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There are various arguments in favour of tempering algorithmic decision-making with human judgement. One common family of arguments appeal to concepts and criteria derived from legal philosophy about the nature of law and legal reasoning, and argue that algorithmic systems cannot satisfy them (but humans can). This paper argues that among the latter family of arguments, there is often an implicit appeal to the notion that each case needs to be assessed on its own merits, without comparison to or generalisation from previous cases. This notion of 'individual justice' has featured in jurisprudential debates about the granularity of rules and tests, and the (in)justice of discrimination, but has not yet been explicitly imported into debates about justice and algorithmic decision-making. This paper has several aims. The first is to provide an overview of the concept of individual justice and distinguish it from related but distinct arguments about the value of human discretion. Equipped with this account of human judgement as a guarantor of individual justice, the second aim is to consider its place within and beside algorithmic decision-making. It argues that in so far as individual justice is valuable, it can only be meaningfully served through human judgement, because it antithetical to the kind of predetermined reasoning that characterises algorithmic systems. This suggests that-to the extent that individual justice is deemed important-a requirement for human intervention and oversight over algorithmic decisions is necessary. The third aim is to consider how individual justice relates to other dimensions of justice, namely consistency and fairness or non-discrimination. Finally, the article discusses two challenges that are raised by this account. The first challenge concerns how individual justice can be accommodated alongside other dimensions of justice in the socio-technical contexts in Human Judgement in Algorithmic Loops DRAFT 2 which humans-in-the-loop are situated. The second concerns the potential inequities in individual justice that might result from an uneven application of human judgement in algorithmic settings.

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Scaling the Gap

Denvir¹

2020

Modernising Legal Education

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The Emperor's New Expert System

Cited by 6 publications

References 3 publications

Human Judgment in algorithmic loops: Individual justice and automated decision‐making

Human Judgment in algorithmic loops: Individual justice and automated decision‐making

Human Judgement in Algorithmic Loops; Individual Justice and Automated Decision-Making

Scaling the Gap

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