Cognitive Science and Law

How does a lawyer think? Does legal intuition exist? Do lawyers need imagination? Why is legal language so abstract? It is no longer possible to answer these questions by applying philosophical analysis alone. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of the human mental faculties and the tools we use to solve problems. A new picture of the functioning of the legal mind is emerging. In The Legal Mind, Bartosz Brożek uses philosophical arguments and insight from the cognitive sciences to depict legal thinking as a close cooperation between three cognitive mechanisms - intuition, imagination, and language - and addresses the question of how to efficiently use these mental tools. This novel and provocative approach provides a fresh perspective on legal thinking and gives rise to important questions pertaining to the limits of legal interpretation and rationality in the law.

This article examines the compatibility of law and robotics by comparing robotic and human legal-decision making. In a scenario where a robot and a person make exactly the same legal decision, with the same factual consequences, there would still be an important difference between the robotic and human decision-making processes. People will be able to relate to the human decision-maker, and this capacity shapes the judgment individuals have over the fairness of the decision and its outcome. Concurrently, individuals are not able to relate to the robot in the same scenario, and to reproduce the conditions of relatability in the robot is unforeseeable with the current development of cognitive sciences. Our capacity to judge the fairness or unfairness of the actions of others shapes our acceptance of and faith in the legal system. Robots making legal decisions would not recreate the same conditions of trust in the fairness of the legal-system, which is one source of incompatibilities between law and robotics.