The Information Age challenges the competency and cultural acceptability of traditional legal systems. Reciprocally, some AI methods are themselves in need of public oversight and stronger social trust. Legal systems and information technology are, however, positioned to help each other; each realm has specific tools to address the problems faced by the other. If properly integrated, their partnership can enhance the law’s efficacy as well as reduce AI’s potential dangers. This work reaches what may seem a paradoxical conclusion: that the strongest contribution to humanizing the law may be to redirect some attention away from humans and their individual choices . Doing so encourages a legal/AI framework that focuses less on individual choices or their market-place aggregation, and more on the environments in which people actually live, the behaviors or outcomes produced inside those settings, and the measure of those outcomes against explicitly stated justice goals. In an increasingly algorithmic society, AI tools should enable stronger legal problem-solving; but ex ante and post hoc legal oversight should also ensure algorithmic outcomes that are more just as well as more accurate. This Chapter reflects on what the tools of AI, combined with the law, may offer: a process of understanding social environments more realistically, designing them more deliberatively, and seeking defined ends for a differently imagined humanity.
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