Can machine learning help to reduce costs and facilitate access to justice within the legal system? We first consider constitutional constraints to which deployment of ML in the legal system are subject; in particular, the protection of fundamental rights and the need to give reasons in legal decisions. We then turn to the technical state of the art with ML analysis of caselaw decisions. It is possible to predict outcomes of cases, given a set of facts, with a high degree of accuracy, but the explainability of these methods is limited. The research frontier therefore explores ways to provide legal reasons for case predictions.

Speaker: John Armour is Professor of Law and Finance at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy and the European Corporate Governance Institute.

https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/john-armour