Exploring AI in legal spaces

Dr. Katie Szilagyi is the University of Manitoba Faculty of Law’s resident expert in Artificial Intelligence and the law surrounding it. Her new book, The Rule of Law After Artificial Intelligence: Automated Narratives, officially publishes on September 14 from the University of Chicago Press. The book is a timely investigation of the philosophical and practical implications of using AI in legal spaces, beginning with several fundamental questions: What is the law supposed to do, and from where does it derive its authority? Would law still achieve these aims if automated? How might automation affect the rule of law’s integrity and democratic institutions’ operations?

Connecting law and storytelling

Blending legal philosophy, applied case studies, and insights from both critical legal scholarship and science and technology studies, Szilagyi argues that law and storytelling are deeply connected. “Through creating and contesting the law, we make sense of the information around us and generate narratives about our collective world,” she writes. “These narratives are not static: legal precedent evolves, and legal deliberation on hard cases can help to resolve unclear or unprecedented social issues.”

Szilagyi demonstrates that technological innovations make the Rule of Law vulnerable because large language models and machine learning undermine the visioning function of legal narratives, collapsing exercises of legal interpretation into mere administration. Datafication of law—built on the biased data of our cultural past—threatens longstanding legal ideals, lessens the constraints against abuses of power by private actors, and hamstrings society’s ability to reach a more egalitarian future. Szilagyi argues instead for centering narratives within the law and, in turn, rediscovering the tales the law tells us about who we are.

An expert in law and technology

Dr. Katie Szilagyi is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law having returned to UM, her first alma mater, in 2021. Within Robson Hall, she teaches courses on property law, privacy law, law and technology, and artificial intelligence. Her areas of research focus include the same, plus algorithmic decision-making, autonomous weapons, blockchain and legal theory.

She brings to the Faculty of Law, an unprecedented research focus on Law and Technology, having a background in Biosystems Engineering with a Bachelor of Science degree from UM (2008), and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Ottawa (2012) with joint specializations in Law and Technology and International Law. Her LLM from Tel Aviv University, specialized in Law and Technology (2017). She returned to the University of Ottawa for her doctoral studies and was selected as a 2019 Global Fellow of the Institute of Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Dr. Szilagyi is a frequent speaker, panelist, and judicial educator on issues pertaining to AI, legal theory, legal practice, and legal education. She recently gave testimony on the impact of AI on human rights and the future of work before the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Human Rights. 

Dr. Szilagyi’s research is innovative, interdisciplinary, and award-winning. The Faculty of Law asked her about her new book on the eve of its official September 14th publication by the University of Chicago Press. 

What was your motivation for writing this book?

Discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) reached a fever pitch in 2023. People are anxious for experts to tell them what is going to happen next, whether their jobs are safe, and what this new frontier means for the future of humanity. In the legal field, lawyers are struggling with questions of how to best integrate new AI and ML-based technologies into their legal practice. Lawyers are constrained by professional obligations to provide the best possible services to their clients but are unsure what best practice should look like in an age of AI tools.

Judges are wondering whether they can still trust lawyers’ submissions when they may have been prepared by AI systems, and even whether their own skilled judgment might soon be obsolete, replaced by natural language processing (NLP).

Law students look to the future with trepidation, asking whether their chosen profession will be transformed by the availability of these powerful new technologies. And, the public, always aware of the looming presence of law and order over their lives and freedom, question what impacts AI and ML might have on their legal interests.

Real-world implications of AI in the legal field

In this book, I take a thoughtful step back from the existential worries about AI and ML to think through real-world implications of its adoption in the legal field. Harnessing my training as both an engineer and a lawyer, as well as my 16 years of research experience focused on technology law and automation, I contribute a unique, interdisciplinary perspective to the emerging AI discourse.

Based on my award-winning doctoral thesis, this book goes beyond the recent hot takes on AI, showcasing ideas developed over years of careful research. I contextualize the current conversation with plain language explanations of how AI works, which frameworks might be used to better understand it, and how the realities of human decision-making might lead to adopting AI and ML approaches to legal process. Through the lens of AI, I analyse questions about legal decision-making and interpretation that have long preoccupied jurisprudence scholars. Yet, by combining unique insights from cyberlaw, science and technology studies (STS), and law as narrative, I offer an original framework for understanding the risks posed by AI, both for the legal field and society. The stories that law tells, and the collective fictions that bind society together, are threatened by an overly quantified approach. Undue reliance on data, especially data steeped in the biases of our world, could hamstring future conceptions of law and prevent society from reaching a more egalitarian future.

What gaps in this area of research does this book address?

My central argument is that the Rule of Law is made vulnerable by technological innovations in AI and ML that take power previously delegated to legal decision-makers and put it in the hands of machines. I assert that we need to interrogate the potential impacts of AI and ML in law because, without careful scrutiny, they can erode certain fundamental ideals. Democracy is dependent upon the Rule of Law: upon a contiguous narrative thread linking past legal decisions to our future lives. Incursions of AI and ML technologies into legal process—including algorithms and automation; profiling and prediction—threaten longstanding ideas in legal systems and lessen the constraints against abuses of power by private actors.

Engaging with a story-telling approach

Stylistically, this book adopts a storytelling approach, making the readability of its prose another way to appreciate law as narrative. Each chapter begins with a personal story that relates to the theme of that chapter, showcasing the importance of lived experience for the legal imagination. By connecting real-world examples to complex legal ideas, I offer readers various ways to imagine the impacts of new technologies on their own lives and their own interactions with the law. The version of law I use is broad, rooted in well-known philosophical ideas, and includes examples from the global community, thereby making the book appealing to audiences across countries. While some discussions are theoretical in nature, the connecting themes of the book are intended to be broadly applicable to AI’s current cultural moment.

What audience can benefit from this book?

This book will appeal to various constituencies, including: technology lawyers; legal academics researching in the fields of technology law, cyberlaw, privacy law, and legal theory (including doctrinal jurisprudence, relational theory, and law as narrative); law students; other graduate students in related disciplines; engineers interested in ethics; and ethicists interested in technology.

This book will also be intriguing to members of the public who are curious about the connection between technology and the law or how artificial intelligence will affect our institutional structures like the legal system. My message is an important part of the conversation on how AI and ML could disrupt the foundations of our legal system, and in turn has the potential to degrade well established legal systems around the world. This message makes my book attractive to anyone who is passionate or curious about the nexus between technology and the law; exciting for anyone who is researching legal, ethical, and technological connections; and essential to policy makers, administrators, and developers who will be deciding how artificial intelligence will be implemented into legal processes.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

I offer readers a look into how AI exacerbates certain Rule of Law problems and how AI, done wrongly, might exploit certain weaknesses in the overall fabric of law. AI technology has developed in a way that underscores Rule of Law vulnerabilities that might not have otherwise been highlighted. AI thereby operates as a social lens, revealing both problems with and opportunities to repair the Rule of Law. There may well be situations in which the supervised use of AI technologies could resolve long-standing issues for the law, but these situations should not be adopted until the associated social consequences are roundly interrogated.

I demonstrate these insights through investigating three different technologies powered by AI/ML systems: sentencing software, facial recognition technology, and natural language processing. Through these examples, I lead readers through a consideration of how AI/ML will affect the Rule of Law in practice. Ultimately, when readers reach the final page, I hope to have equipped them with a robust normative framework to prevent a dangerous disruption to the Rule of Law.

What further research is needed to address remaining gaps in this area?

The sky is the limit! Law and technology is an exciting, ever-changing field, with new technologies being released every day that promise to transform the world as we know it. The methodology for best understanding and framing these problems is still being developed by legal scholars, ethicists, and policy makers concerned with making sure new technologies give us more than they take away. It’s a great time to be a law and technology scholar.