Scaling Laws: Courtney Cox on AI in Adjudication

Courtney Cox, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss her forthcoming article, Hardwiring Hercules?.

It’s a great read that builds on Dworkin’s idea of a perfect adjudicator, Hercules. Courtney argues that the debate over a “right to a human decision” has missed a central problem: normative uncertainty. Machines may struggle to explain their decisions, but humans often struggle too—especially when judges are uncertain about what they ought to do. At the same time, the common response that people merely have a right to a “better decision,” whether by human or machine, assumes we know what “better” means. Courtney’s paper challenges both sides of the debate and asks what AI governance should look like when regulators, engineers, and judges cannot simply “hardwire Hercules.”