This kind of comes back to the common law vs civil law system. Most English-speaking countries operate under a common law system where the laws as written down provide the ground work, but precedent set by previous court cases is also legally binding. In contrast most of Europe and South America operates under a civil law system (yes, terrible name, not the opposite of criminal law) where the written law reigns supreme and previous court decisions are merely informing opinions.
As you can imagine, algorithmic decisions are incredibly difficult in any common law system. And while they might be viable in a civil law system, you would lose out on the ability of a judge to give consideration to the specific circumstances of each case.
In practise both systems end up unwieldy in an attempt to be fair. Common law systems because of the overwhelming amount of precedent to consider, civil law systems because the laws become incredibly long and complex, with complex interactions between laws
How do they achieve consistency in civil laws systems?
In the US if say a district court in California and a district court in Oregon adopt incompatible interpretations of a federal law, someone will appeal to the appeals court that covers both California and Oregon, that court will interpret that law and then that is binding in all that states under that appeals court (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington).
If some other appeals court in some other region goes a different way, it can go to the Supreme Court which makes an interpretation for the whole country.
We eventually reach consistency even if Congress is unwilling or unable to revisit the law.
It seems like the best use of ai / computing power would be to do common law through llm? I understand it’s nuanced and complicated but that seems like a good use case for our current ai systems ? What am I missing ?
Court isn’t about understanding if action X violates law Y. Analyzing that part is quick in preliminary work. All of the hard work is proving that the defendant performed X, proving they had intent and it wasn’t an accident, etc.
As you can imagine, algorithmic decisions are incredibly difficult in any common law system. And while they might be viable in a civil law system, you would lose out on the ability of a judge to give consideration to the specific circumstances of each case.
In practise both systems end up unwieldy in an attempt to be fair. Common law systems because of the overwhelming amount of precedent to consider, civil law systems because the laws become incredibly long and complex, with complex interactions between laws