Computational Legal Studies: Past, Present, and Future

On 2-4 March 2022, Director A/Prof Daniel Seng and Research Assistant, Shaun Lim, delivered a paper entitled “The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Law” at the Computational Legal Studies 2022 conference, hosted by SMU’s Yong Pung How School of Law. The conference was well-attended by computational law researchers worldwide, and saw a vibrant exchange of ideas over the three days. The conference featured keynotes delivered by notables in the field such as Professors Kevin Ashley and Daniel Katz, and some limited physical participation from international researchers from Germany and Hong Kong.

The paper explored the modern origins of the field of computational law as defined by Nathaniel Love and Michael Genesereth, who envisioned a computational law system to comprise of three components: semantic data, machine-processable rules and reasoning, and application of such rules based on the dataset. The paper used these three aspects of computational law as a framework to discuss computational law with greater precision, and also to create a shared understanding of computational law.

With this framework in mind, the paper delved into machine-processable rules and reasoning in particular, by looking at existing attempts to combine legal logic with programming languages (Prolog, Solidity, Blawx, Datalex, L4). The paper concluded that  while progress has been made in this area, computers are still some distance away from being able to reliably produce robust legal reasoning. To address situations where a computational law system renders an incorrect decision, a combination of greater human oversight and statistically-driven oversight (through the detection and highlighting of anomalies to a human decision-maker) can be utilised.

For more information of this conference, please refer to the link HERE.