Robustness and Overcoming Brittleness of AI-Enabled Legal Micro-Directives: The Role of Autonomous Levels of AI Legal Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI-enabled legal micro-directives can be made more robust by understanding their evolution, the trade-offs in their design, and addressing brittleness issues to ensure reliable legal automation.

Contribution

It extends legal micro-directives theory by analyzing AI levels, trade-offs between standards and rules, and proposing remedies for brittleness in AI legal reasoning.

Findings

Legal micro-directives are likely to be AI-enabled and evolve over time.

Trade-offs exist between legal standards and rules in micro-directives.

Brittleness exposures can undermine AI legal directives, with potential remedies proposed.

Abstract

Recent research by legal scholars suggests that the law might inevitably be transformed into legal micro-directives consisting of legal rules that are derived from legal standards or that are otherwise produced automatically or via the consequent derivations of legal goals and then propagated via automation for everyday use as readily accessible lawful directives throughout society. This paper examines and extends the legal micro-directives theories in three crucial respects: (1) By indicating that legal micro-directives are likely to be AI-enabled and evolve over time in scope and velocity across the autonomous levels of AI Legal Reasoning, (2) By exploring the trade-offs between legal standards and legal rules as the imprinters of the micro-directives, and (3) By illuminating a set of brittleness exposures that can undermine legal micro-directives and proffering potential mitigating remedies to seek greater robustness in the instantiation and promulgation of such AI-powered lawful directives.