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The challenge of artificial intelligence: can Roman law help us discover whether law is a system of rules?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Geoffrey Samuel
Geoffrey Samuel*
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
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Extract

It may or may not be possible to develop an Artificial Intelligence model of legal reasoning that accurately reflects the processes of the legal mind, but one positive result that could well emerge from all the research into such modelling is a fundamental reassessment of legal theory. The paradigm that legal reasoning is essentially a rule based activity may well have to be discarded in favour of an epistemological model that is very much more complex, in the systems sense of this term, than the hierarchical structure traditionally associated with jurists since the Enlightenment (if not since the Byzantines) and represented in one of its most perfect theoretical forms today in Kelsen's model. It is the purpose of this paper to examine, if only briefly, this challenge to conventional legal theory (Part I) and, using systems theory, historical jurisprudence and Justinian's Digest (Part II), to suggest an alternative epistemological model (Part III).

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 24 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1991

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