What Is the Point of the Justice System?
With all of the new AI announcements coming at us every day, I keep coming back to the same fundamental questions: “What is the justice system? What is the point?”
I’m not asking this rhetorically. This is a real question we need to answer if we’re going to move forward responsibly in this AI era. Because if we don’t understand what we’re trying to preserve and improve, we risk losing it entirely.
Look, I get the excitement. The pace of AI advancement is overwhelming in the best way. Every week there’s a new release, a new announcement, a new promise that this technology will make everything faster and more efficient. As someone who’s been modernizing courts with technology for years, I understand the appeal better than most.
But here’s where I keep getting stuck. Some people are now arguing that AI will eventually be better than judges at making legal decisions because AI is more consistent, less emotional, and somehow free from bias. They also argue that AI can make these decisions almost instantaneously so why not just let the machines take over?
Here’s where this logic gets dangerous. First of all, whose singularity are we designing for? And it doesn’t stop with judges, does it? Should we also replace jurors and create a system where twelve different bots, pulled from twelve different companies, decide cases based on their training data? Should we let AI determine who gets prosecuted and who gets diverted? Should we dissolve parole boards and allow a machine to make final decisions about second chances? And what about civil lawyers? Do we need them anymore?
These aren’t distant hypotheticals, folks. These are real conversations already happening and they’re moving faster than most people realize.
That’s exactly why this moment requires clarity from all of us. We have to define what the justice system actually “is” before we change it into something it was never meant to be.
The justice system is not just a tool for resolving disputes. It’s not just about efficiency or outcomes, though those matter. It’s a human institution built on values like accountability, dignity, fairness, and public trust.
The process matters. Being heard matters. And knowing that a real person sat with the facts, considered the law, and made a decision they’re willing to sign their name to matters more than we might think.
This is why we have open courtrooms, why we provide decisions with reasons and why we allow appeals. Justice isn’t simply about reaching the right answer. It’s also about how we reach it.
Courts are not startups. We’re not here to “move fast and break things.” We’re not in a race and our job isn’t to be first. Our job is to get it right.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for modernization. I’ve spent my career embracing tools that help us serve people better. But we must move carefully, and we must never forget the purpose behind the system we’re modernizing.
If we lose sight of that, it won’t matter how powerful the technology becomes. We’ll have traded away something essential in the name of convenience.
And once we do that, we may not get it back.
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