ABSTRACT

There is a view that in the not too distant future the functions of law will be discharged by smart technologies, that smart machines will serve as legal functionaries. The context for Alarie’s discussion is one in which we want to know how a particular legal distinction (such as that between ‘an employee’ and ‘an independent contractor’) will be applied to a given set of facts. The idea in Alarie is that an AI tool could be trained using the reported decisions to predict the outcome of new cases and in due course even to decide those cases. Given the bigger picture perspective of Law 3.0, a rather different response might be made. This is that the focus on using AI tools to give guidance on the application of legal rules or principles together with the fear that smart machines might replace litigation lawyers and judges betrays a fixation with Law 1.0.