Our use of language is under attack from an all-consuming Artificial Intelligence. Through this new technology large corporations and unaccountable state bodies mould our ideas – often in concert with one another. This has enormous ramifications for legal practice.
The precision of legal language is vital to the administration of justice. Lord Bingham considered clarity intrinsic to the Rule of Law. It ought to be clear to any citizen in a well-regulated polity if his or her behaviour breaches the law. Any uncertainty can give rise to tyrannical government overreach.
As Lord Atkin put it in the seminal case of Liversidge v Anderson (1942) when confronting the slippery use of terms by government officials:
I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master, that’s all.”
At a psychological level, the Rule of Law has already been significantly corroded by binary thinking. This appears to a product of declining educational standards, with an emphasis on so-called STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities.
A.I. further devalues the written word – upon which our laws rests – and thereby irrevocably alters legal practice. The era of Fake Law is only just beginning. A.I. has already led to false precedents being presented in court cases. This technology is also eliminating employment opportunities for commercial lawyers. Some might welcome this outcome, but the Rise of the Machines brings enormous dangers.
Laws depend on social norms: these are the unwritten rules and shared standards of acceptable behaviour that govern society. If society broadly internalises rules, however absurd or extreme – those governing social interactions during Covid for instance – these will still apply. On the other hand, if a law is generally ignored it is unlikely to be enforced.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1936) is clairvoyant in this regard, depicting how effective propaganda internalises social attitudes. In that novel the drug soma produces compliance, a role being played in our time by addictive social media. Recall, as Goebbels well understood, most propaganda is indirect, lulling people into submission through light entertainment.
Robots
Karel Čapek in his famous play RUR (1921) invented the term ‘robot’ – deriving from the Czech word robota, or forced labor, as done by serfs. It begins in a factory fabricating artificial workers. Eventually a rebellion breaks out, that culminates in the extinction of the human race.
In his subsequent novel, War of The Newts (1936) a breed of newts are initially enslaved and exploited, but acquire human knowledge and rebel, leading to a global war for supremacy. In our Brave New World compliant robotas and implacable newts leave us on the brink of World War III.
More recently, Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking (2025) demonstrates how a conservative-authoritarian mindset often lacks mental dexterity. Such viewpoints are associated with rigidity, fixity and intolerance of others. She outlines the effect this can have on the human brain, inculcating false binaries and prejudices. In my experience, many lawyers display these characteristics.
Indeed, lawyers are unusually susceptible to manipulation, as they tend to enforce matters literally, and even dogmatically. These days we are often confronted with enforcing nonsensical laws.
Once upon a time I attended a launch of The Crane Bag magazine in the long room of the College Historical Society, alongside the late great Patrick McEntee SC and future President Mary Robinson. A central theme of one article was the unsatisfactory nature of ‘slot machine’ justice. It was an evocative phrase, redolent of its time, not least given how the authorities were then shutting down gaming dens in Bray, county Wicklow.
I propose a remodelled, if less elegant, phrase for our current era in law: Justice by Algorithms, Disinformation and Social Media. Like “slot machine justice” it conveys a sense of pro forma justice, and the abandonment of complexity, nuance, and judgment. These amount to the human factor, or humanism, and matters of principle.
In terms of the administration of justice, we are breeding compliant robots, both through a limited legal education – which has always tended to avoid exploring humanistic themes. It is also engendered through the work practices of legal professionals. I am referring to the corporate work of monitoring, time-keeping, and all-important billable hours.
Thus, what passes for justice is increasingly being administered by robotic humans. Moreover, we may safely assume that laws are being designed by algorithms for vested interests.
In the past the erosion of jury trials in the U.K. would have led to uproar, but opposition now barely flickers, in large part because mainstream media has never been so lacking in independence – another product of the Internet age.
We are also witnessing a proliferation of ‘no smoke without fire’ decisions to prosecute. Due process and international norms of justice are being torn asunder, including unlimited data retention in Ireland. This involves the rowing back of Article 3 of the Convention through the Council of Europe, which Irish vogueishness is spearheading.
Minority Report
In the book and film Minority Report a specialized ‘precrime’ police department apprehends would-be criminals with the use of foreknowledge provided by three psychics. We are now entering similar territory of predictive-justice and guilt-by-accusation. It is not hard to imagine a world where crime-by-thought-process becomes a reality.
In this context, Al Weiwei in his recent superb monograph On Censorship (2026) makes the point that the new surveillance state controls the truth and releases mere fragments of information.
Resistance to brainwashed transhumanism and intellectual infantilism is now essential. This is especially difficult, however, in a culture of self-censorship, where we avoid controversial subjects as a coping mechanism, and to suit short-term interests.
A crucial shift has occurred in recent times. Covid-19 is the most obvious example of Internet-induced anxiety being used to enforce quite astounding compliance, via ‘mass formation.’ The nonsensical rules were anathema to the clarity demanded of the Rule of Law, and stock arguments were induced to deter opponents, who were labelled ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘conspiracy theorists’ or just ‘selfish’.
This template shifted almost overnight into orchestrated belligerence against Russia, preying on latent fears of an external non-European Other. Once again there were ‘extremists’ spouting ‘conspiracy theories’ or ‘Kremlin talking points.’ New and far-reaching forms of censorship continued to undermine the Rule of Law
The advent of A.I. heralds a new and insidious propaganda regime, scaffolded on a culture addicted to the narcissistic or pugilistic soma – chose your poison – of social media. Unfortunately, most lawyers are psychologically and educationally ill-equipped to counteract Justice by Algorithms, Disinformation and Social Media.
Yet legal clarity remains crucial to the administration of justice, and there remain lawyers who recognise the importance of the Rule of Law. It is essential for us to resist an increasingly robotic legal order, and reassert timeless values, otherwise our civilisation faces extinction.
Feature Image: A scene from 1938 BBC TV adaptation of Karel Čapek’s sci-fi play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).
