Call for Papers:
Over the past few years, the widespread development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in
the legal and judicial domains, and the rise of legal technologies have started to cause
a revolution, both in the daily life of practitioners and in the foundations of these
domains.
The availability of large corpora of legal documents allows to train machine-learningbased
systems, which are now used by lawyers build cases, shortening the time
needed to find relevant information within the haystack of jurisprudence. These
machine/deep learning based systems have a profound influence on the daily practice
of legal professionals. However, the automation of such work can cause social
opposition. The advent of predictive justice, which will have a deep impact on the legal
system in both the mid- and long-term, also raises important ethical issues (e.g.
transparency and discrimination).
These points will become even more pronounced if some of the decisions previously
made by judges are automatized in the future. In addition, access to software
predicting the outcome of a case and the likely amount of compensation has lead to
the development of legal optimization: one aims to plead a case in the most favorable
conditions to win. It will exacerbate the power imbalance between legal teams that
have access to AI and those that do not. Thus, while AI has the potential to positively
impact many aspects of law and justice, it must be applied in an ethical and socially
responsible manner.
The objective of the proposed Special Track is to gather both researchers and
professionals working at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, law and justice.
Participants will have the opportunity to present recent developments in the field, to
discuss the main challenges lying ahead, both scientifically and in terms of social
acceptability and ethics. The Special Track is looking for theoretical contributions as
well as practical contributions targeting real-life applications. In addition, the Special
Track being multidisciplinary by nature, contributions coming from human and social
sciences are also welcomed.
Topics of interest of the Special Track, in the scope of the legal domain, include but
are not limited to:
Important Dates:
Special Track Co-organizers:
Hugo Cyr − Dean of the Faculty of Political Science and Law
Sébastien Gambs − Professor of Computer Science [Privacy and Security]
Marie-Jean Meurs − Professor of Computer Science [Artificial Intelligence]
Affiliation: All the co-organizers are with the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada