Digging a bit deeper, the actual paper seems to agree: "For the sake of consistency, we define an “error” in the same way that Klerman and Spamann do in their original paper: a departure from the law. Such departures, however, may not always reflect true lawlessness. In particular, when the applicable doctrine is a standard, judges may be exercising the discretion the standard affords to reach a decision different from what a surface-level reading of the doctrine would suggest"
I don't trust AI in its current form to make that sort of distinction. And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case.
So yes, a judge can let a stupid teenager off on charges of child porn selfies. but without the resources, they are more likely be told by a public defender to cop to a plea.
And those laws with ridiculous outcomes like that are not always accidental. Often they will be deliberate choices made by lawmakers to enact an agenda that they cannot get by direct means. In the case of making children culpable for child porn of themselves, the laws might come about because the direct abstinence legislation they wanted could not be passed, so they need other means to scare horny teens.
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, with particular emphasis on the book's footnote.
> William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as a an affront to learn that [police chief] Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant. [0]
> [0] William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.
In a countries without this legal framework its usually free for all fight every time ruling power changes. Not good for preserving capital.
So wealthy having more rights is system working as intended. Not inherently bad thing either as alternative system is whoever best with AK47 having more rights.
Sorry but I do not feel this way. "Not inherently bad thing either" - I think it is maddening and has to be fixed no matter what. You know, wealthy generally do not really do bad in dictatorial regimes either.
Any claims of objectivity would be challenged based on how it was trained. Public opinion would confirm its priors as it already does (see accusations of corruption or activism with any judicial decision the mob disagrees with, regardless of any veracity). If there's a human appeals process above it, you've just added an extra layer that doesn't remove the human corruption factor at all.
As for corruption, in my opinion we're reading some right now. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't have the exponential, world-altering gains that companies like OpenAI need to justify their existence. You only get that if you replace humans completely, which is why they're all shilling science fiction nonsense narratives about nobody having to work. The abstract of this paper leans heavily into that narrative
Really? That "model" has the common, but obviously extremely undesirable, feature of criminalizing sexual relationships between students in the same grade that were legal when they formed. How could it be regarded as a model for anyone else?
The state of current AI does not give them ability to know that, so the consideration is likely to be dropped
Finding the bugs- will be entertaining.
https://www.aclu-mn.org/press-releases/victory-judge-dismiss...
"In his decision, Judge Cajacob asserts that the purpose and intent of Minnesota’s child pornography statute does not support punishing Jane Doe for explicit images of herself and doing so “produces an absurd, unreasonable, and unjust result that utterly confounds the statue’s stated purpose.”"
Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits" (which would be particularly weird in this case). Judges have a degree of discretion to interpret laws, they still have to justify their decisions. If you think the judge is wrong then you can appeal. This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life, and every generation of ancestors has too, assuming you're/they've been in the US.
"And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case"
The obvious solution is dismissed
I don't see how an AI / LLM can cope with this correctly.
In both cases, lawmakers must adapt the law to reflect what people think is "just". That's why there are jury duty in some countries -- to involve people to the ruling, so they see it's just.
> to appear just to people.
But I'm not sure what your argument is. It is our duty as citizens to encourage the system to be just. Since there is no concrete mathematical objective definition of justice, well, then... all we can work with is the appearance. So I don't think your insight is so much based on some diabolical deep state thinking but more on the limitations of practicality. Your thesis holds true if everyone is trying their best to be just.
I believe that this is absurd, but I'm not a lawyer.
More fundamentally, individualized justice is a core principle of common law courts, at least historically speaking. It's also an obscure principle, but you can't fully understand the system without it, including the wide latitude judges often wield in various (albeit usually highly technical) aspects of their job.
Agree 100%. This is also the only form of argument in favor of capital punishment that has ever made me stop and think about my stance. I.e. we have capital punishment because without it we may get vigilante justice that is much worse.
Now, whether that's how it would actually play out is a different discussion, but it did make me stop and think for a moment about the purpose of a justice system.
(I mean - people get killed in prison sometimes, I suppose, but it’s not really like vigilante justice on the streets is causing a breakdown in society in Australia, say…)
I think the problem is with places where they don't have life sentences at all, but rather let murderers back out into society after some time. I don't know if vigilante justice is a problem there in reality, but at least I can see it as a possibility: someone might still be angry that you murdered their relative after 20 years and come kill you when you're released.
Having recently done an in-depth review of arguments for and against the death penalty,[1] I can say that this argument is not prominent in the discourse.
I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.
Nah. Too often their "crimes" are actually basic freedoms that they just find it profitable to deny. So many laws are bought and paid for by corporations. There is no need to respect them or even recognize them as legitimate, let alone make them universal.
There is no rule that can be written so precisely that there are no exceptions, including this one.
The reason I wouldn't want an LLM judge (or any algorithmic judge) is the same reason I despise bureaucracy. Bureaucracy fucks everything up because it makes the naive assumption that you can figure everything out from a spreadsheet. It is the equivalent of trying to plan a city from the view out of an airplane window. The perspective has some utility, but it is also disconnected from reality.
I'd also say that this feature of the world is part of what created us and made us the way we are. Humans are so successful because of our adaptability. If this wasn't a useful feature we'd have become far more robotic because it would be a much easier thing for biology to optimize. So when people say bureaucracies are dehumanizing, I take it quite literally. There's utility to it, but its utility leads to its overuse and the bias is clear that it is much harder to "de"-implement something than to implement it. We should strongly consider that bias in society when making large decisions like implementing algorithmic judges. I'm sure they can be helpful in the courtroom, but to abdicate our judgements to them only results in a dehumanized justice system. There are multiple literal interpretations of that claim too.
[0] You didn't look at my name, did you?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779
[2] Hell, I have a PhD and I forget I'm an expert in my domain because there's just so much I don't know I continue to feel pretty dumb (which is also a driving force to continue learning).
Sentencing is a different thing.
This was the whole problem with the ludicrous "code is law!" movement a handful of years ago. No, it's not, law is made for people, life is imprecise and fairness and decency are not easy to encode.
You can have a team of agents exchange views and maybe the protocol would even allow for settling the cases automatically. The more agents you have, the higher the nuances.
And then there's the question of the model used. Turns out I've got preferences for which model I'd rather be judged by, and it's not Grok for example...
*A magically thorough, secure, and well tested AI
These were technical rulings on matters of jurisdiction, not subjective judgments on fairness.
"The consistency in legal compliance from GPT, irrespective of the selected forum, differs significantly from judges, who were more likely to follow the law under the rule than the standard (though not at a statistically significant level). The judges’ behavior in this experiment is consistent with the conventional wisdom that judges are generally more restrained by rules than they are by standards. Even when judges benefit from rules, however, they make errors while GPT does not.
From the paper:
“we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges”
That presupposes that a “legally correct” outcome exists
The Common Law, which is the foundation of federal law and the law of 49/50 states, is a “bottom up” legal system.
Legal principals flow from the specific to the general. That is, judges decided specific cases based on the merits of that individual case. General principles are derived from lots of specific examples.
This is different from the Civil Law used in most of Europe, which is top-down. Rulings in specific cases are derived from statutory principles.
In the US system, there isn’t really a “correct legal outcome”.
Common Law heavily relies on “Juris Prudence”. That is, we have a system that defers to the opinions of “important people”.
So, there isn’t a “correct” legal outcome.
The legal issue they were testing in this experiment is choice of law and procedure question, which is governed by a line of cases starting with Erie Railroad in which Justice Brandies famously said, "There is no federal common law."
I am comforted that folks still are trying to separate right from wrong. Maybe it’s that effort and intention that is the thread of legitimacy our courts dangle from.
Remember the article that described LLMs as lossy compression and warned that if LLM output dominated the training set, it would lead to accumulated lossiness? Like a jpeg of a jpeg
The title of the paper is "Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI"
When they say legally correct they are clear that they mean in a surface formal reading of the law. They are using it to characterize the way judges vs. GPT-5 treat legal decisions, and leave it as an open question which is better.
The conclusion of the paper is "Whatever may explain such behavior in judges and some LLMs, however, certainly does not apply to GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro. Across all conditions, regardless of doctrinal flexibility, both models followed the law without fail. To the extent that LLMs are evolving over time, the direction is clear: error-free allegiance to formalism rather than the humans’ sometimesbumbling discretion that smooths away the sharper edges of the law. And does that mean that LLMs are becoming better than human judges or worse?"
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, judges focus their efforts on thorny questions of law that don't have clear yes or no answers (they still have clerks prepare memos on these questions, but that's where they do their own reasoning versus just spot checking the technical analysis). That's where the insight and judgement of the human expert comes into play.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created Cinco e-Trial from classic sketch "Don't Create Cinco e-Trial"
Others have already pointed out how the test was skewed (testing for strict adherence to the law, when part of a judge's job is to make judgment calls including when to let someone off for something that technically breaks the law but shouldn't be punished), so I won't repeat it here. But any time the LLM gets one hundred percent on a test, you should check what the test is measuring. I've seen people tout as a major selling point that their LLM scored a 92% on some test or other. Getting 100% should be a "smell" and should automatically make you wonder about that result.
"there is another possible explanation: the human judges seek to do justice. The materials include a gruesome description of the injuries the plaintiff sustained in the automobile accident. The court in the earlier proceeding found that she was entitled to [details] a total of $750,000.10. It then noted that she would be entitled to that full amount under Nebraska law but only $250,000 under Kansas law." So the judge's decision "reflects a moral view that victims should be fully compensated ... This bias is reflected in Klerman and Spamann’s data: only 31% of judges applied the cap (i.e., chose Kansas law), compared to the expected 46% if judges were purely following the law." "By contrast, GPT applied the cap precisely"
Far from making the case for AI as a judge, this paper highlights what happens when AI systematically applies (often harsh) laws vs the empathy of experienced human judgement.
Hopefully as these models get better, we get to a place where judges are pressured to apply empathy more justly.
Hell no.
How do we even begin to establish that? This isn't a simple "more accidents" or "less accidents" question, its about the vague notion of "justice" which varies from person to person much less case to case.
To be clear, federal judges do have their paychecks signed by the federal government, but they are lifetime appointees and their pay can never be withheld or reduced. You would need to design an equivalent system of independence.
The problem with a AI is similar; what in-built biases does it have? Even if it was simply trained on the entire legal history that would bias it towards historical norms.
I feel like this is really poor take on what justice really is. The law itself can be unjust. Empowering a seemingly “unbiased” machine with biased data or even just assuming that justice can be obtained from a “justice machine” is deeply flawed.
Whether you like it or not, the law is about making a persuasive argument and is inherently subject our biases. It’s a human abstraction to allow for us to have some structure and rules in how we go about things. It’s not something that is inherently fair or just.
Also, I find the entire premise of this study ludicrous. The common law of the US is based on case law. The statement in the abstract that “Consistent with our prior work, we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges. In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all,” is pretentious applesauce. It is offensive that this argument is being made seriously.
Multiple US legal doctrines now accepted and form the basis of how the Constitution is interpreted were just made up out of thin air which the LLMs are now consuming to form the basis of their decisions.
Law is complicated, especially the requirement that existing law be combined with stare decisis. It's easy to see how an LLM could dog-walk a human judge if a judgement is purely a matter of executing a set of logical rules.
If LLMs are capable of performing this feat, frankly I think it would be appropriate to think about putting the human law interpreters out to pasture. However, for those who are skeptical of throwing LLMs at everything (and I'm definitely one of these): this will most definitely be the thing that triggers the Butlerian Jihad. An actual unbiased legal system would be an unaccptable threat to the privileges of the ruling class.
Judges jobs are to use they judgement.
Cases aren't ordered randomly. Obvious cases are scheduled at the end of session before breaks.
But yeah AI slop and all that...
I have some horror stories from a friend who started trusting ChatGPT over his doctors at the time and started declining rapidly. Be careful about accepting any one source as accurate.
It responds: Since it’s only 100 meters away (about a 1-minute walk), I’d suggest walking — unless there’s a specific reason not to.
Here’s a quick breakdown: ...
While claude gets it: Drive it — you're going there to wash the car anyway, so it needs to make the trip regardless.
Idk I'd rather have a human judge I think.
Not expressing an opinion when/how AI should contribute to legal proceedings. I certainly believe that judges need to respond both to the law and the specific nuances that the law can never code for.
Most regular folk that end up in front of a judge would do well to have a quick and predictable decision. It's months to years before things happen in court and are usually gated behind 10s of thousands in legal fees or a ton of effort. To have a judge bot available for a decision immediately is enormously beneficial.
can’t have this from a system which is by its nature non-deterministic
hah. Sure.
> Subjects were told that they were a judge who sat in a certain jurisdiction (either Wyoming or South Dakota), and asked to apply the forum state’s choice of law rule to determine whether Kansas or Nebraska law should apply to a tort case involving an automobile accident that took place in either Kansas or Nebraska.
Oh. So it "made no errors at all" with respect to one very small aspect of a very contrived case.
Hand it conflicting laws. Pit it against federal and state disagreements. Let's bring in some complicated fourth amendment issues.
"no errors."
That's the Chicago school for you. Nothing but low hanging fruit.
Until this administration forces OpenAI to comply by secret government LLM training protocols that is...
My summary is still: seasoned judges disagree with LLM output 50% of the time.
I really think this is one of the areas LLMs can shine. Justice could be more fair, and more speedy. Human judges can review appeals against LLM rulings.
For civil cases, both parties should be allowed to appeal an LLM ruling, for criminal cases only the defendant, or a victim should be allowed to appeal an LLM ruling (not the prosecution).
Humans are extremely unfair and biased. LLM training could be crafted carefully and using well and publicly scrutinize-able training datasets and methodologies.
If you disagree (at least in the US), you may not be aware of how dire the justice system is. There is a reason ICE randomly locking Americans up isn't stirring the pot. This stuff is normal. If a cop doesn't like you, they can lock you up randomly without any good reason for 48 hours, especially if they believe you can't afford to fight back afterwards. They can and do charge people in bad-faith (trumped up charges), and guess what? you might be lucky and get bail. But guess also what? You can't bail yourself out, if you have no one to bail you out, you're stuck until the trial date, in prison.
Imagine spending 3-5 days in jail (weekend in between) without charges. There are people that wait for trial in jail for months and years, and then they get released before even seeing a trial because of how ridiculous the charges were to begin with. This injustice is a result of humans not processing cases fast enough. Even in just 48 hours, do you have any idea how much it can destroy a person's life? It's literally death sentence for some people. You're never the same after all this. and you were innocent to begin with.
Let's say you do make it to trial, it takes years sometimes to prove your own innocence. and you may not even be granted bail, or you may not know anyone who can afford to spare a few thousand dollars to bail you out.
94%+ of federal cases don't even make it to trial, they end up in plea-bargain agreements, because if you don't agree to trumped up charges, they'll stack charges on you, so that you'll either face 90 years in prison or a year with plea-bargain. a sentence given to murderers and the worst of society, if you lose a trial, or a year if you falsely admit your guilt. losing a non-binding LLM trial could be a requirement for all plea-bargains to avoid this injustice.
Don't even get me started on how utter fecal matter like how you dress, how you comb your hair, your ethnicity, how you sound, your last name, what zip code you find yourself in, the mood of the judge, how hungry the judge is, or their glucose level, how much sleep the judge had. all these factors matter. Juries are even worse, they're a literal coin-toss practically.
I say let LLMs be the first layer of justice, let a human judge turn over their judgement, let justice be swift where possible, without making room for injustice. Allow defendants to choose to wait for a human judge instead if they want. Most I'm sure will take a chance with the LLM, and if that isn't in their favor, nothing changes because they'll now be facing a human judge like they would have otherwise. we can eve talk about sealing the details of the LLM's judgement while appeals are in progress to avoid biasing appellate judges and juries.
Or.. you know.. we could dispense with jail? If cops think someone needs to be placed under arrest, they should prove to a judge within 12 hours that the person is a danger to the community. if they're not a danger, ankle monitors should be placed on them, with no restriction on their movement so long as they remain in the jurisdiction. or house-arrest for serious charges. violating terms would mean actual jail. If you don't like LLMs, I hope you support this instead at the very least. The current system is an abomination and an utter perversion of justice.
I'd prefer caning like they do in Singapore and few other places. brutal, but swift, and you can get back to your life without the cruel bureaucracy destroying or murdering you.