Reimagining Justice: How to Build Legitimate AI for Judges | Brian Barry | TEDxTrinityCollegeDublin

How comfortable would you be with a judge using an AI tool to help decide your court case? Today, judges often rely on AI tools to help them make decisions – from recommending sentences, to predicting risk in domestic violence cases, to drafting judgments. This is a seismic change in how justice is done. Stripping back a well-functioning judicial system to its 101 elements, legitimacy is a crucial building block. Where judges use AI, the public must have confidence in the fairness of court processes and outcomes, and view them as legitimate. This TEDx talk sets out a roadmap for legitimate AI in courts. The idea is straightforward: just as judges must follow principles of good conduct, AI tools must follow principles of good design. The roadmap has three key milestones achieved through stakeholder-led research. First, define principles to guide AI tools. Second, translate these principles into technical guardrails that shape their design. Third, test whether AI tools are trusted, and perceived as procedurally fair. If not, don’t deploy them. Achieving these milestones will ensure AI for helping judges is only adopted where it serves judicial legitimacy, not undermines it. Dr Brian Barry is Associate Professor at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin. Brian teaches and supervises students in AI regulation and AI for legal systems. His research investigates ways to make courts and judicial decision-making work better for court users, particularly through technology. His current focus is experimental research on how design features of AI for courts affect people’s trust in judicial processes. He was recently awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Award (value €2 million) for a project called JUDGEASSIST to pursue this research. Brian is author of How Judges Judge: Empirical Insights into Judicial Decision-Making (Informa Law from Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of The Digital Judge (forthcoming from Edward Elgar). Before legal academia, Brian briefly practised as a commercial litigation solicitor in a leading Dublin law firm. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx