I have an unusually speculative article — more futurism than law as such — coming out in a few months in the Duke Law Journal, called Chief Justice Robots. I’d love to hear what people think. Here are the Introduction and the Conclusion; you can read the full article here:

Introduction

How might artificial intelligence change judging? IBM’s Watson can beat the top Jeopardy players in answering English-language factual questions. The Watson Debater project is aimed at creating a program that can construct short persuasive arguments. What would happen if an AI program could write legal briefs and judicial opinions?

To be sure, AI legal analysis is in its infancy; prognoses for it must be highly uncertain. Maybe there will never be an AI program that can write a persuasive legal argument of any complexity.

But it may still be interesting to conduct thought experiments, in the tradition of Alan Turing’s famous speculation about artificial intelligence, about what might happen if such a program could be written. Say a program passes a Turing test, meaning that it can converse in a way indistinguishable from a human. Perhaps it can then converse—or even present an extended persuasive argument—in a way indistinguishable from the sort of human we call a “lawyer,” and then perhaps in a way indistinguishable from a judge.

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