Can Robot Judges Solve the So-Called “Hard Cases”?

Abstract

From the perspective of legal theory, there are two types of cases for judges to decide: “easy cases” and “hard cases”. This line of thought relates to cases that are decided by humans. The last few years have seen rapid progress in the development of artificial intelligence, and an increasing number of ideas have been put forward that envisage the transfer of algorithmic task execution to the world of law. Legal theory and jurisprudence are interdependent, and a solution needs to be found to the question of how much algorithms can reduce the burden on the judiciary in the application of the law. This problem is not alien to legal theory, since the idea of law as an axiomatic system and the idea of judgment machines was already present in Leibniz’s philosophy.