LEXplain kick-off in Paris

Professor Henrik Palmer Olsen presented our first draft paper, “Architectures of Legal Justification and XAI for Legal Decision-Making,” to Parisian colleagues and Assistant Professor Jennifer Raso from McGill University (Montreal), a member of the project’s advisory committee. The paper aims to establish a shared foundation for our interdisciplinary project.

We received highly valuable feedback on our attempt to develop an interdisciplinary framework for the requirements of justificatory explanations in legal decision-making. Professor Pierre Brunet, a legal theorist at the Institut de recherche juridique de la Sorbonne, challenged us to critically examine the use of the term “justificatory explanations.”

Assistant Professor Raphaëlle Xenidis from Sciences Po, formerly a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, expanded on this by emphasizing the importance of recognizing that justification is not only about the technical programming of decision-making processes, but also about explaining the broader socio-legal context.

The idea that the quality requirements for justification should be adapted to the complexity of the case was well received. Professor Mathilde Cohen, George Williamson Crawford Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, who works across disciplines including deliberative democracy and judicial decision-making, sparked a broader discussion about what constitutes “quality” and “high quality.”

Associate Professor Lionel Zevounou (University of Paris Nanterre) and Research Fellow Jean Lassègue (EHESS) contributed to the discussion on how quality can be defined when artificial intelligence is used to tailor legal decisions.

Associate Professor Delphine Dogot (Université Catholique de Lille), who leads research on digital and emerging technologies at C3RD, further challenged us to explore whether AI could be used for the self-assessment of legal rules.

Our visit to Paris concluded with an inspiring meeting the following day with Jennifer Raso, who studies how algorithmically driven technologies are transforming front-line administrative decisions, and Professor Fabien Tarrisan, a computer scientist at CNRS and École Nationale Supérieure (Paris), both members of the project’s advisory committee.

We left Paris with a deeper understanding of the spectrum of justificatory requirements that we need to define and explore in our project.