Taken from the speech “Australia’s Constitutional and Judicial System” By Stephen Gageler, Chief Justice of Australia
Question from Judge YAMADA Yoko of the Yokohama District Court:
In the near future, artificial intelligence might be able to provide logical judgments more cheaply and
efficiently than humans. Given that possibility, what do you believe are the irreplaceable values that human judges and human courts can offer to society, and what qualities and capabilities should judges cultivate in order to deliver that value? I would be very interested in your thoughts on the role and significance of judges in the age of AI.
Chief Justice Gageler’s answer:
I think this is the second most difficult question to be asked. And my difficulty is that I know a lot
about judging but I don’t know very much about AI, although I have really sought earnestly to understand it.
I fear that there is very little that the judge does that AI cannot do better. There is a famous description
of law by Sir Edward Coke, the great Lord Chief Justice of England who had to confront James the First
of England, who, as King, decided that he could judge disputes between his subjects as well as could his
judges. The King’s argument was that law was just reason, and that he, as King, had reason as much as any judge, and that he could do the job just as well. Lord Coke had to explain “No, Your Majesty. Law is
artificial reason, and only with deep learning and long experience can the artificial reason of the law be brought to bear on disputes.” And His Majesty, said Lord Coke, “although very wise in human affairs, did not appreciate this artificial reason.”
Now that always struck me as a very stylized but adequate explanation of the nature of legal reasoning
as distinct from ordinary human reasoning. I think artificial intelligence is artificial reasoning on stilts. I
think that it is likely to produce more predictable, equally learned, if not more learned, and fair outcomes
than human judges. This is my true fear.
What is it that a human can bring to the process that artificial intelligence will not be able to bring to
the process either now or in two years? I don’t think there’s very much, but I think there is something that
is really more important in criminal law than in civil law. My prediction is that civil law practice will probably
be overtaken by artificial intelligence very soon. But I think in criminal law there is something about the
vulnerability, the identification, the humanness of the subject matter, or the object or the person who is to
be subjected to criminal liability. I can’t articulate it particularly well but there’s something fundamentally
important about the person who is making the decision that somebody else is to be deprived of their liberty for what they have done being a person who could equally be deprived of their liberty if they did the same thing. I think there’s something fundamentally important about a human subjecting another human to punishment.
Australia’s Constitutional and Judicial System By Stephen Gageler Chief Justice of Australia








