The LINCS/LINAS Seminar series is student-led and organised by Dr Meg Schwamb and LINAS Doctoral Scholars Anna Montgomery and James Sweeney.

We would love it if as many of you as possible could join us for this Seminar. Refreshments will also be provided!

The speakers for this Seminar will be:

Karli Gibson, a second year LINAS Doctoral Scholar, will be presenting a paper titled ‘UK Bordering: An Algorithmic Hostile Environment’

Marc Elliott, a second year LINAS Doctoral Scholar, will be presenting a paper titled ‘AI in Education – Challenges, Risks and Mitigation Methods’  

Professor John Morison - Professor of Jurisprudence in the School of Law at Queen's and programme leader on the LINAS Doctoral Programme, will be presenting a paper titled ‘‘Xiaofa the robot judge and the impossible task of mapping law’.

Abstract: This paper explores the potential and limitations around developing AI judging. Drawing upon accounts of some developments in this field in China, the paper outlines some of the potential available here before focusing on the limitations of AI and ML approaches. The arguments are less technical – although there are formidable obstacles there – and more related to understandings of the nature of law. A proper account of the nature of law, drawing upon realist and Foucauldian understandings of the nature of law and the operation of legal culture, will be sketched out. It will then be argued, through a critique of two AI-positive approaches, that the essentially social nature  of law as well as its dynamic character is impossible to capture within any technology short of some unattainable General Artificial Intelligence.  While AI approaches may transform some aspects of the operation of legal systems, it will be argued that the job of ‘judging’ stricto sensu will remain beyond the capacity of any machine.