Corey Rayburn Yung (University of Kansas School of Law) has posted The End of Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Law has been on a journey: from an emanation of a sovereign (Rule of Men) to a set of principles designed to prevent arbitrary rule (Rule of Law) to massive legal systems capable of governing dynamic industrial nations (Rule of Systems). A driving force behind each developmental stage has been minimizing the fallibilities of human beings in the application of law. Enter generative artificial intelligence (genAI), which has provoked predictions of profound disruption to legal practice, adjudication, and the Rule of Law itself. Proponents envision a future of frictionless access to justice, consistent legal reasoning, and the elimination of human bias from decision-making (Rule of Machines). Critics warn of opacity, unaccountability, and the erosion of the judgment that law requires. Both camps treat these stakes as novel, products of a technological rupture with no meaningful precedent.
However, the debates now unfolding around genAI are not new. They extend jurisprudential contests that have persisted throughout each of the prior stages of law’s development. The enthusiasm for algorithmic consistency echoes legal formalism’s ambition to purge law of the arbitrary. The anxiety about algorithmic law rehashes longstanding arguments that law without empathy is not just. And the deeper worry that language models cannot truly understand law revives unresolved questions about whether law is a formal semantic system or a social practice. The Article reframes genAI as a jurisprudential rather than technological problem, separating its new dangers from inherited ones, and proposes a framework for minimizing the harms of its introduction to law.
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