AI for English Law - Work Package Two - Mapping Digital Justice

This work package will develop an evidence-based analytic framework to guide introduction of digital justice measures, with a view to enhance coordination across government and private-sector investments. The goal is to develop an empirically and constitutionally robust methodology to inform initial design and on-going evaluation of legal AI. Early work in automation of courts (eg Civil Justice Council, 2015; Briggs, 2016) will establish ‘path dependencies’ that may greatly affect subsequent automation of decision-making and case management. Online dispute resolution (‘ODR’) offers the potential to provide rich data for training future AI dispute resolution systems, but only if structured to facilitate this.

• What are the constitutional opportunities and constraints in automating justice?
• How do these fundamental constitutional principles interact with technological and economic considerations in designing digital justice systems? 
• How do we measure and evaluate compliance with constitutional norms in an empirically robust manner?