Being able to see: conflict, imagination and the ethos of Artificial Legal Intelligence. Some remarks inspired by the Greek tragedy Antigone
An analysis of the frame(s) within which the discourses around Artificial Legal Intelligence are inscribed is becoming growingly relevant. Addressing the narrative structure and the ethos that animates the different standpoints in such debate seems to be a necessary step in order to both achieve a better understanding of the way in which frames inform the design and deployment of techno-legal tools, and to avoid being locked by the inherent limits of a certain perspective and the language it uses.
The toolkit provided by data and code driven technologies latches on and intertwines with some of the narrative structures that are more entrenched in the history of western legal thinking, resulting in a frame that can, at once, broaden our view as well as make us blind. While being the supporting structure on which we organize our experience, therefore enabling our action, such frame can become a cage: it can give us the impression to see better but, at the same time, hinders us to see beyond. Approaching law as data or as a set of predefined rules can let out of sight the importance of lawyers’ situated perspective and promote an understanding of legal practice that, in the long run, will affects jurists’ identity.
My aim will be to stimulate a discussion on the role played by visual opening and (juridical) imagination by drawing some insights from the Greek tragedy Antigone. This tragedy offers a particularly rich interweaving of perspectives on themes that seems to play a relevant role for such discussion: the connections between knowledge, deliberation and complexity; how our system of beliefs interacts with our way of structuring experience; the role that conflict and fortune play in our life, and our attempts to manage - or even deny - them.
This event will be hosted online.
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