The pros and cons of legal automation and its governance

The paper examines the field of legal automation, its advantages and drawbacks, the ways in which legal constraints and safeguards can be embedded into technology and how the law may govern human behaviour through codes, IT architectures, and design. By stressing both benefits and shortcomings of legal automation, however, the paper does not suggest that the latter is something “neutral.” Rather, making legal reasoning and enforcement automatic, so that even a machine can process and understand this information, should be conceived as a set of constraints and affordances that transform, or reshape, the environment of people’s interaction and more specifically, the interplay of human and artificial agents, thereby affecting basic pillars of the (rule of) law. The overall aim is to flesh out goals and values that are at stake with choices of technological dependence, delegation and trust, so as to determine the good mix between legal automation and public deliberation.