AI & Law: Machine Readability Of Judicial Decisions

Machine readability of judicial decisions is important for AI & Law

by Dr. Lance B. Eliot

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Key briefing points about this article:

• Judicial opinions can be tough to figure out and the writing style is often obtuse
• There have been ongoing calls for judges and courts to write in a more human-readable way
• More recently, there are calls for judicial decisions to be made readily machine-readable
• Part of the basis for wanting machine readability would be to aid AI-based legal reasoning
• Whether judicial decisions will change in style and wording seems like an uphill battle

Introduction

I’m sure that you’ve at one point or another tried to get a toddler to eat the right kinds of foods, or at least you’ve seen comedy sketches on TV and in movies that portray the challenges involved. One approach involves spoon-feeding the child, but this can be heart-wrenching if the youngster decides to dearly resist and opts to desperately spit out those undesirable and yet quite healthy…