A focus on these schemes as central to law explains why AI efforts in this area were first directed to expert systems that embodied rules and managed the input of facts as terms of a deduction to generate legal conclusions. Descriptively and prescriptively, however, the place of multivalent logic and inductive inference in actual legal decision-making has always been acknowledged and debated and is, arguably, increasingly prevalent. The spectacular inroads of machine learning and large language models have focussed attention on the ability of AI models to point to a legal outcome without reference to rule-based logical deduction. Can there be law without that reference?
Fabien Gélinas is a Full Professor of Law and the William C. Macdonald Chair at McGill University. His teaching and research address dispute resolution, common law and civil law contracts, commercial law, legal theory, and law and technology. He heads the Private Justice and the Rule of Law Research group at McGill and is a cofounder of the Montreal Cyberjustice Laboratory. He has taught at the Centre d'études diplomatiques et stratégiques de Paris (École des hautes études internationales), the Université de Paris II - Panthéon Assas, the National University of Rwanda in Butare, Trinity College Dublin, Sciences Po Paris, New York University and the National University of Singapore.
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