AI predicts outcomes of human rights trials

The judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have been predicted to 79% accuracy using an artificial intelligence (AI) method developed by researchers at UCL, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania. The method is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court by automatically analysing case text using a machine learning algorithm. The study behind it was published today in PeerJ Computer Science . 'We don't see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they'd find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes. It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European Convention on Human Rights,' explained Dr Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science. In developing the method, the team found that judgements by the ECtHR are highly correlated to non-legal facts rather than directly legal arguments, suggesting that judges of the Court are, in the jargon of legal theory, 'realists' rather than 'formalists'. This supports findings from previous studies of the decision-making processes of other high level courts, including the US Supreme Court.