/filters:format(webp)/filters:quality(100)/prod01/channel_3/media/tcd/law/images/research/JUDGEASSIST.png)
Project Details
JUDGEASSIST will create the first analytical framework for evaluating AI systems designed for assisting judicial decision-making and ensure their principled development. Assistive AI systems are proliferating globally, deployed for a range of decision-making tasks and areas of law; e.g., recommending sentences, weighing risk in intimate partner violence cases, determining liability in road traffic accidents, and generating judgment texts. This represents an emerging paradigm shift in how justice is done in courts, raising opportunities and considerable risks that impact the legitimacy and integrity of judicial systems.
Scholarship on these developments is limited owing to a scarcity of cross-disciplinary perspectives, a lack of empirical insight, and little meaningful collaboration with judges, lawyers and the public to evaluate its impacts and design. Against this backdrop, JUDGEASSIST will create new, future-proof modes for investigating, developing and deploying AI to assist judicial decision-making through an analytical framework that is both conceptually novel (through cross-disciplinarity), and methodologically innovative (through mixed methods empirical research and stakeholder input).
JUDGEASSIST’s objectives are:
1) to establish principles to guide the development and deployment of AI systems for specific tasks in different judicial contexts; 2) to draft technical standards to build AI systems aligned to these pre-determined principles; and, 3) to develop ways to test how effectively the technical standards operationalise the pre-determined principles. Combined, the work packages to fulfil these objectives make up the analytical framework.
JUDGEASSIST will contribute new modes for understanding, evaluating, and developing AI systems for assisting judicial decision-making, addressing an urgent societal challenge: to ensure that this technology is deployed such that it upholds the legitimacy and integrity of judicial systems, and aligned to European rule of law values.