| 9:00 – 9:05 |
Introduction
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| 9:05 – 9:15 |
Abstract:
Meng Weng Wong joins us from the Singapore Management University’s Centre for Computational Law to share a sneak peek at L4, a formal language currently being designed to express the semantics of laws and contracts. The language builds on a research tradition in symbolic AI that tends more to programming language theory and formal methods than neural-net machine learning. Unlike previous contract languages, L4 is intended for an audience of software developers first, and theoreticians, lawyers, and blockchainers second. (The current syntax is inspired by the database language SQL.) If the research successfully escapes academia, it will provide a platform and protocol for a new generation of LegalTech products and services. The programme is less than a year old, and is actively recruiting research engineers from Master’s to post-docs.
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| 9:15 – 9:30 |
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| 9:30 – 9:40 |
Liane Huttner, Law PhD student, University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne
Software called legal expert systems are used around the world by private and public organizations to compute taxes. A bug in such programs can lead to tax miscalculations and heavy legal and democratic consequences. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that some legal expert systems may not meet satisfying criteria to be in compliance with the law. Moreover, they are difficult to adapt to the continuous flow of new legislation just by using traditional software development processes. To prevent further software decay and reconcile these systems with the growing demand for algorithmic transparency, we present a solution built by lawyers and computer scientists : a new programming language, Catala, coupled with a pair programming development process.
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| 9:40 – 9:45 |
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| 9:55 – 10:05 |
Article Submission: “The Legislative Recipe: Syntax for Machine-Readable Legislation”
Megan Ma, Lecturer in Law and Law PhD Student, Sciences Po, France
Scholars have frequently lamented about ambiguity in legal drafting, specifically owed to syntactic uncertainties. The ancestry dates back to twelfth century logicians reflecting on the use of mathematically precise forms of writing. In the mid-1930s, German philosopher, Rudolf Carnap, reflected on a logical syntax for language. His argument is that logic may be revealed through the syntactic structure of sentences. He suggests that the imperfections of natural language point instead to an artificially constructed symbolic language to enable increased precision. Simply put, it is treating language as a calculus.
Machine-readability appears to bridge the desire for precision with the inherent logic and ruleness of specific aspects of the law. In other words, a potential recipe to resolve the complexity of legalese. The prospect of machine-readable legislation is both terrifying and thrilling. This renewed popularity is owed to the Rules as Code initiative. The fervor around Rules as Code was accelerated by the recent OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation Report titled, “Cracking the Code: Rulemaking for Humans and Machines.” While the report succeeded in providing a comprehensive overview of machine-consumable legislation, there remains a gap around implementation and the form machine-readable legislation should take.
One question remains fundamentally unanswered: what should be the role of machine-readable legislation? The paper, therefore, attempts to move beyond existing literature to discuss the implications of various approaches to machine-readable legislation. The paper will focus on logic syntax and symbolic language to assess the capacity and limits of representing legal knowledge. In doing so, it will highlight the challenges encountered in this burgeoning ecosystem of machine-readability.
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| 10:05 – 10:20 |
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| 10:20 – 10:25 |
Break
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| 10:25 – 10:33 |
Blog Post: "AI and Patent Offices: Challenges and Opportunities"
We consider how patent offices such as the EPO and USPTO could use AI to conduct prior art searches when assessing the novelty and non-obviousness requirements. AI provides an opportunity for patent offices to streamline patent examinations, but it could also pose a threat, e.g. in terms of expansion of the prior art to be consulted by patent examiners. AI can be used to create huge quantities of prior art which potentially could destroy the novelty of inventions under examination. We weigh up these factors in the context of fairness and justice in the governance of patent systems.
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| 10:33 – 10:45 |
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| 10:45 – 10:55 |
Article Submission: “Fiscal transformations due to AI and robotization: where do recent changes in tax administrations, procedures and legal systems lead us?”
This article starts with a description of current transformations experienced by tax administrations worldwide -as shown in several reports published by international organizations. This phenomenon is analyzed in order to assess its impact on subsequent changes that are being proposed to traditional tax rules.
The legislative status quo is often dependent on practicality when carrying out certain administrative tasks. Nowadays, increased technological capabilities have proved to be a condition to review procedural and substantial regulation in almost every country. Moreover, in the coming years, the connectivity between information systems between the public and private sector will have a decisive influence on the evolution of tax Law.
This contribution searches for common guidelines that can be taken into consideration by computation experts to efficiently protect justice and the rule of Law in taxation in the middle of these ongoing processes. The author suggests a subject centered analysis, with the purpose to take advantage of the expected benefits, while minimizing risks.
The human-centered approach to AI and robotization requires considering the “multi-faceted” nature of humans. We may simultaneously be users, workers, taxpayers, clients, etc. This calls for the need of an integral assistance, also with technological means, as they are affecting us in different spheres. The sectoral restricted views may impede true digital rights. Some general Charters to state these ‘updated’ rights are now being developed under the constitutional and international legal framework. However, they should be somehow generally embedded in technology to assure justice when exerting tax sovereignty in front of individual or collective entities. To that end, maybe experts in computation could adopt codes of conduct.
Many tax administrations are already rendering services through electronic means, such as chatbots. Its actual implementation in turn serves to capture relevant data about the (legal) persons subject to different types of tax obligations. At a later stage, this information is sometimes used to prepare more detailed administrative guidance in real life, or even design future normative reforms.
In the strategy towards ‘compliance by design’, apart from particular human-machine interactions; other degrees of relation will probably have to be considered, like human-machine-machine-human interactions. It is worth noting that automatization may partially connect datasets that were separated in the past (e.g. immediate access to accounting) and this would entail important changes in the regulation of tax procedures, while balancing the protection of taxpayers’ safeguards.
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| 10:55 – 11:10 |
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11:10 – 11:20
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Article Submission: “Legal Technology, Regulation and Access: Equality and Process Norms”
Paul Gowder, Law Professor, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Technology apps are intended to reach consumers. While the motivation of small and large companies in developing and marketing these apps is surely pecuniary, those from outside the B2B or B2C tent can legitimately assess this enterprise from a broad perspective as mechanisms to provide greater access to justice.
Despite the ubiquity of these efforts and the rapidly changing technologies being developed, the law’s approaches to regulation have remained remarkably traditional. The law deals with the negative impacts of technology on consumer well-being through some admixture of antitrust, unfair trade practices, and intellectual property. While these are important component parts of regulatory approach, in their conventionality and their intentional focus on the marketplace and on property rights, they can miss the essential aim of facilitating consumers’ ability to get access to the justice system.
This is especially problematic insofar as some of these tech devices are intended to, or have the effect of, displacing lawyers in advice and even representation. Lawyer behavior is regulated through various mechanisms described above, but, descriptively, lawyers engage in self-regulation and the main structure of regulation is the ethical rules that govern lawyer behavior.
We need to think about new regulatory approaches to these emerging technologies. In this essay, we consider what the ends of some of these approaches are, and offer a somewhat bold, or even radical, take on legal technology regulation, focusing specifically on the risks of use and misuse by different segments of society and the marketplace.
In addition, we advocate the development and implementation of what we call, admittedly abstractly, equality and process norms. These norms are not offered as judicially enforceable legal constraints (not because we cannot imagine their use in this way, but because this is beyond the scope of this particular essay). Instead, we offer them as guideposts for government authorities in considering how best to regulate these new technologies. The most radical part of our argument in this part of our essay is a refocus from consumer protection (and certainly also from protection of the lawyers’ guild) to consumer access.
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| 11:20 – 11:35 |
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| 11:35 – 11:45 |
Article Submission: "Using AI to Summarize Contracts: Terms and Conditions as an Example"
Yi Wu, CS Professor, Tsinghua University
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| 11:45 – 12:00 |
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12:00 – 12:05
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Debrief and Wrap-up
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| 12:00 – 1:00 |
Virtual Networking and Discussions (Optional for those who wish to stay)
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