SUMMARY
Algorithms Are Fair And Without Any Bias, Two Things Required In The Indian Judicial System
Good judges think of themselves as being public servants. After all, justice is a service which every citizen of this country is entitled to, and judges are responsible for providing it. The irony today is that often the Indian judicial system itself serves as a hurdle and impedes the average citizen’s access to justice.
We all know there are lots of problems with the law machinery today. The process is painfully slow and the delays are interminable. Judgments are often unpredictable and uncertain, and it’s often not possible to predict the outcome of a dispute on a rational basis. This is why the first issue most senior lawyers assess when looking at the brief is not the legal merits of the matter, but which judge it will come up before! I’m sure a lot of High Court judges will also agree that many orders issued by lower courts don’t make any rational sense at all, which is why they spend so much of their time hearing appeals!
It’s well-known that rich litigants have a much higher chance of winning their cases, because they have the ability to pay for expensive senior counsels. Logically, why should it make any difference as to who’s arguing your case – or who’s hearing it? After all, isn’t Justice means to be blind? In a perfect world, the decision would be based on the facts of the matter and the applicable law, so that which lawyer is presenting which client should not influence the judge’s decision at all! The reality, as we all know, is that it does make a big difference and this is why clients pay such a huge premium for the face value of the lawyer.
However, this is not the way law should be practiced, and this is not the way for justice to be delivered. How eloquent or articulate your counsel is should not affect the merits of your case at all – after all, the facts and applicable law remain the same! In a perfect world, delivering the right verdict should be a straight forward matter of assessing the truth of the claims; applying logic; checking the statutes and precedents; weighing the pros and cons of the options; and then coming to the right decision.
The problem, of course, is that lawyers as well as judges today are overloaded. While they do their best to be objective in order to come to the right decision, this can be hard when there is such a huge backlog of cases, and the pressure of time makes it hard for them to give their best all the time.
This Is Where AI Can Come In To Help The Indian Judicial System
We now have massive databases which have archived all the judicial system which have been passed in a particular domain over many years. These summarise the pleadings of opposing lawyers, as well as the final reasoned order which the judge has passed, so we have well defined inputs as well as outputs. These can serve as training sets, and using supervised machine learning, algorithms will be able to describe what reasoning was used by a particular judge in a particular case to pass a particular order.
Over time, as they get better the hope is that they will be able to predict which judgment is likely to be passed in a particular case in the Indian judicial system, with a high degree of probability. Their “judgment” can then be compared with the one delivered by a human judge in real life, so that this feedback will help them to get incrementally smarter over time.
A good judge would not feel threatened by these programmes, because he understands that it’s simply an additional tool he can use when he needs to in order to be able to deliver better judgments. Just like a lawyer is an office of the Indian judicial system who’s supposed to help the judge to weigh all the evidence and come to the right decision, algorithms could also be seen as playing exactly that role! A judge could invoke them in order to help him think through things a little more critically so that he can come to a better decision than he would have without the help of the computer.
Both humans and computers need to work together to deliver better judicial services, rather than just depending on humans alone – or computers alone. AI will not replace judges – it will become the tireless, irreplaceable, and cost-effective complement of judges, giving them more time to focus on the complexities of individual cases.
The beauty of algorithms is that they are always fair – and because they are transparent, it’s easy to understand the reasoning behind their decisions. They don’t get bored; they are repeatable and consistent; and can be scaled up easily.
Using AI will actually increase the public’s confidence in the judiciary, because they know that algorithms won’t get influenced by extraneous factors and won’t cheat!
We could start with simple cases, where there is not much room for discussion about the merits of the case. The judicial system today is clogged with lots of mundane matters such as traffic violations and divorce by mutual consent. These could be fast-tracked using algorithms and these would help judges to deliver decisions more speedily. The judges could then focus on more complex legal issues, which require more nuanced human interventions. Over time, the algorithms could move up the value chain and deal with those, as well.
These programmes could help lawyers in the Indian judicial system, as well. Not all lawyers have easy access to legal research and law libraries, but these algorithms will allow them to prepare better arguments, because they will have access to the relevant statutes, case law and precedents. It will also help them better prepare for the arguments the opposite lawyer will present. Finally, it will be useful for clients as well, as they will have an objective assessment of what their chances of winning their case are so they won’t get carried away by an over-enthusiastic lawyer who wants to litigate!
[This post by Dr. Aniruddha Malpani first appeared on LinkedIn and has been reproduced with permission.]
