The Turing Test and the Legal Process

Abstract

The author proposes a novel thought-experiment, the "Turing litigation game." Specifically, we propose replacing the existing arcane and archaic systems of civil and criminal procedure with a simple and probabilistic litigation game resembling the Turing Test from the world of computer science. The remainder of this paper is thus divided in four parts. Following this brief introduction, Part 1 provides some background by describing the original Turing Test and explaining how the Turing Test resembles the process of adjudication. Part 2 then describes our proposed Turing litigation game and identifies the conditions for implementing this alternative approach to litigation, while Part 3 introduces the possibility of probabilistic verdicts (as opposed to the traditional system of binary verdicts). Part 4 concludes.

Keywords: Turing Test, Turing litigation game, probabilistic verdicts

JEL Classification: K41, K49