Cross-jurisdictional AI Methods for Civil Law Court Decisions
1 December 2023
The use of artificial intelligence in the legal domain is growing rapidly to the extent that the current proposal of the AI Act of the European Union explicitly considers its use in the judicial sector as high risk. At the same time, the development of AI for adjudication remains undeveloped despite the significant efforts of the academic community to advance research in this domain.
The development of AI methods and tools remains expensive, data-intensive, and politically sensitive.
This project takes the perspective of civil law jurisdictions. While civil law jurisdictions represent 60% of the world’s legal systems, it remains hard to capitalize on this mass of data due mainly to language barriers, decreasing the potential benefits of belonging to the same legal family for the development of AI tools. In this project we examine the possibility of developing AI methods to exploit court decisions that can be transferred across civil jurisdictions. We explore 4 main tasks: anonymization, argument mining, predictive models, and legal explainability (i.e., justification of decision by legal reasoning). We conduct an exploratory study on the case law of Belgian courts—as it involves multilingual decisions—to examine the possibility of transferring multi-lingual models developed in one jurisdiction to other jurisdictions with the same language and civil law tradition (e.g., Germany, France, and the Netherlands).”
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