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201884 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201884 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 2027-08-01T15:00:00 206 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses en Swisher, Keith Pinillos, Angel McGregor, Joan di Bello, Marcello Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Philosophy Humans currently occupy the courtroom: A human lawyer, in a suit, making arguments, and a human judge, in a black robe, making rulings. But in function if not in form, this picture may be coming to an end. As in medicine, finance, education, and other fields, the human legal actors, primarily judges and attorneys, appear to be incrementally transferring their functions to machines. This transfer may be slow or fast, rough or smooth, but the transfer is what drives this work: what are the implications for a future in which artificial intelligence (AI) fulfills many, most, or even all roles traditionally fulfilled by human lawyers and judges. How could and should legal authorities instill, audit, and enforce a notion of human ethics in these legal machines? After providing a brief primer on AI, this work turns to how attorneys and judges currently use AI and how AI may become an increasingly important legal actor. It then explores the relative merits of human legal actors versus advanced legal machines. Although legal machines have vast potential, the importance of legal ethics and practical experience tilt the balance toward human legal actors. The work’s key contributions include five potential defeaters that should stand in the way of AI’s takeover of legal practice: AI lacks human relations and moral responsibility; it has no understanding and feeling of pain; it arguably lacks an individuation capacity necessary for legal reasoning and justice; it lacks legal ethics; and it lacks political legitimacy. These defeaters may present the key design challenges to autonomous machines in law, but creative developers, sympathetic policymakers, or even AI itself may, at some future point, transcend these challenges. Ethics Artificial Intelligence Law Applied Ethics Artificial Intelligence Judicial Ethics Legal Profession Professional Responsibility The Rise of Legal Machines and the Transcendence of Human Ethics