A Smart Legal Order for the Digital Era: A Hybrid AI and Dialogic Model

The emerging trend of using AI, big data, and smart contracts in the legislative process opens relevant research questions in the theory of law, constitutional law, and the philosophy of law. How to preserve the open texture of the law when it is codified? How to guarantee the legitimacy of the lawmaking process in the digital document flow? How to preserve the autonomy of the decision-maker if the law is automated using AI? At the same time, however, we cannot ignore the undeniable benefits the emerging technologies afford in enhancing the quality of legislation, improving the enforceability of the rule of law, checking the compliance of applications, and working toward a better society. This paper presents a possible solution (Law as Platform, or HyperModeLex) for defining a theoretical legal framework (Smart Legal Order) that takes into account the benefits of the emerging AI technologies in a good balance with the computational-law paradigm and the theory of law. In the digital society we need machine-computable law to use legal knowledge mixed with other important artefacts of the infosphere (e.g., apps, the Web, sensors). In meantime we do not want to lose the control of autonomy (the human-in-command) in a sector as important as the legislative system. This research intends to use the Hybrid AI approach where different techniques could contribute to mitigating weaknesses of each specific method (data-driven vs. code-driven). Additionally, the human-computer interaction methodology could help toward designing a dialogic model for making sure the overall legislative process is transparent and explicable.