Making Criminal Procedure Rights Computable

Artificial Intelligence and algorithms are fundamentally transforming most aspects of human activities, starting with decision- making paradigms. The criminal matter does not escape this phenomenon; actually, these technologies are a constant feature of current debates on the development of criminal justice policies. Until now, however, this trend has been especially evident with regard to the deployment of investigative tools that aim at supporting the work of law enforcement in crime prevention and repression. AI can already be used today as a support to better understand complex legal bases, overcoming factors such as multilingualism and divergent legal cultures that negatively a!fect the capacity of defence lawyers to understand the conceptual framework that lies beneath legal notions and textual provisions of other legal systems, even within the EU. This is to say, some forms of AI technology can help the legal operator, first of all the defendant and her defence counsel, to see through the layers of the textual expression and linguistic versions of the legal provisions, getting to the core of the legal notions. This may be obtained, as previously illustrated, by a computable approach to law, which exploits AI as a way to translate legal knowledge and reasoning in a symbolic representation that computers can understand and apply.