![handle is hein.journals/nwteintp19 and id is 1 raw text is: Copyright 2021 by Daniel W. Linna Jr. Volume 19, Number 1 (2021)
Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property
FOREWORD: LAW + COMPUTATION: AN
ALGORITHM FOR THE RULE OF LAW AND
JUSTICE?
Daniel W. Linna Jr.*
Computation is poised to transform legal services, legal systems, and
the law itself. Law firms, corporate legal departments, and legal aid
organizations increasingly use expert systems, Artificial Intelligence, and
other computational tools to provide legal information and legal services to
individuals and businesses, often automating or augmenting tasks performed
by lawyers.1 Courts increasingly use platforms to manage and resolve
matters.2 The longstanding use of algorithms in government has been
supercharged by increasingly powerful computational tools.3 As legal-
services providers, legal systems, and governments develop computational
tools to represent and apply law to factual scenarios, it leads to questions
regarding the extent to which law itself can and should exist in computable
forms.4 Additionally, the rise of computation in the legal ecosystem and the
emergence of ethical principles and law to govern the use of computational
technologies together illustrate the need to reimagine the rule of law for a
digital age.
Daniel W. Linna Jr. has a joint appointment at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and
McCormick School of Engineering as the Director of Law and Technology Initiatives and a Senior
Lecturer.
' See John O. McGinnis & Russell G. Pearce, The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence
Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services, 82 FORDHAM L. REV. 3041 (2014).
2 Maximilian Bulinski and J.J. Prescott, Online Case Resolution Systems: Enhancing Access,
Fairness, Accuracy, and Efficiency (Mich. J. of Race & L., Research Paper No. 16-013, 2016),
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract id=2777059.
3 David Freeman Engstrom et al., Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal
Administrative Agencies (NYU Sch. of L., Research Paper No. 20-54, 2020),
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3551505.
4 Daniel W. Linna Jr., The Future of Law and Computational Technologies: Two Sides of the Same
Coin (December 6, 2019). MIT Computational L. Rep., 2019), https://ssrn.com/abstract=3554591; see
John O. McGinnis & Steven Wasick, Law's Algorithm, 66 FLA. L. REV. 991 (2014); see also Designing
Accountable Software Systems, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION,
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22512/nsf22512.htm [https://perma.cc/YDG5-HMUU ] (Whereas
organizations and individuals throughout our history have been expected to comply with laws and
regulations, now software systems also must be accountable and comply with them. Software systems
need to be designed with legal and regulatory compliance in mind, and should be adaptable to changing
laws and regulations, which themselves evolve with changing citizen expectations and social norms.).
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