“Artificial intelligence, as a concept and as practice, is becoming increasingly popular in courts and tribunals internationally,” said Professor Lyria Bennett Moses.
A joint research report has identified the benefits and issues that come with using AI in court systems worldwide.
It was found that artificial intelligence can make improvements in areas like access to justice, however it could come into conflict with important legal values.
The joint research project came from the Australian Institute for Judicial Administration (AIJA), UNSW Law & Justice, UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation and the Law Society of NSW’s Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession (FLIP Stream).
Professor Lyria Bennett Moses, the Director of the UNSW Allens Hub and Associate Dean of Research at UNSW Law & Justice, said AI presence is increasing in court processes.
“Artificial intelligence, as a concept and as practice, is becoming increasingly popular in courts and tribunals internationally. There can be both immense benefits as well as concerns about compatibility with fundamental values,” she said.
“AI in courts extends from administrative matters, such as automated e-filing, to the use of data-driven inferences about particular defendants in the context of sentencing.
“Judges, tribunal members and court administrators need to understand the technologies sufficiently well to be in a position to ask the right questions about the use of AI systems.”
One of the concerns raised by the report was about the COMPAS tool used in the US to profile prisoners. The Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions tool (COMPAS) uses 137 questions to evaluate the likelihood of re-offense.
Questions range from “how many times has this person been arrested as an adult or a juvenile?” to more ambiguous ones such as “do you feel discouraged at times?”. The findings of the COMPAS tool have real consequences, informing the judge on whether an alleged offender can be granted bail or whether they should be eligible for parole.
“This is not based on an individual psychological profile, but rather on analysis of data,” Professor Bennett Moses said.
“If people ‘like’ you have reoffended in the past, then you are going to be rated as likely to re-offend.”
She questioned whether similar tools would be appropriate in an Australian court, but also pointed to the benefits of AI like aiding access to justice, including overcoming language barriers.
“My main advice is to tread carefully, to seek to understand how things work before drawing conclusions on what the law should do about it,” she said.
“But we need people to ask the right questions, and help society answer them.”
