Values Embedded in Legal Artificial Intelligence

Increasingly, governments areusing technological systems in the application and administration of law[6],[22]. For example, officials use computer systems to sentence criminal defendants, approve or deny government benefits, predict the location of future crimes, and disallow border entry[6],[22]. In each instance, technology is used to make substantive decisions about law, individual legal rights, or allocation of government resources. Let us refer to any automation system used in the administration or application of law as a “legal technological system.” Notably, some of these legal technological systems use machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques to achieve their goals[13]. Let us refer to those as “legal AI systems.”