AI & Law: British Nationality Act Unexpectedly Spurred AI And Law

Stanford CodeX 2021 Prize winner is a keystone paper on AI & Law using the BNA

by Dr. Lance B. Eliot

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Key briefing points about this article:

• A foundational research paper in the 1980s explored the British Nationality Act
• The researchers sought to transform the law into AI-based programming code
• At the time, the Prolog programming language was considered a top means for doing so
• This seminal work has been oft-cited and provided a foundation in AI and the law
• The researchers recently received the inaugural Stanford CodeX Prize 2021

Introduction

Let’s take a look at the past and for which we might also divine a glimpse into the future.

The British Nationality Act was passed in 1981 and shortly thereafter was used as a means of showcasing the efficacy of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and technologies, doing so to explore how the at-the-time newly enacted statutory law might be encoded into a computerized logic-based…