Automating Government Decisionmaking: Implications for the Rule of Law

Abstract

This chapter assesses the benefits and challenges to the rule of law posed by automation of government decision-making. We focus narrowly on aspects of the rule of law that have the widest acceptance across political and national systems, notably that it requires governance in which the law must be predictable, stable, accessible and everyone must be equal before the law. These rule of law values are applied to four case studies: automated debt- collection in Australia, data-driven risk assessment by judges in the United States, social credit scoring in China, and automated welfare in Sweden.

Keywords: Rule of Law, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Algorithms, Public Law, Machine Learning, Statute Drafting, Statutes, Comparative Law, Legal Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Government