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If legal interpretation is no longer purely human but distributed across judges, archives, and algorithms, then who is responsible for a judgment — and on what authority does it rest? A philosophical case that AI is changing the answers.
The article begins by recalling a childhood game where children negotiated roles, illustrating how this seemingly simple play constituted a 'miniature normative universe'. This process involved debating, establishing, interpreting, and contesting rules, thereby generating normativity in real-time. The author argues that this activity mirrors a 'primitive jurisprudence,' demonstrating how the fundamental temporal structure of law involves the continuous production of norms through situated interpretation. The key insight is that the game fostered emergent constraints and rules, not arbitrary freedom, with a seriousness that was internally binding to the children, independent of adult recognition.
Drawing on philosophical concepts, particularly Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics, the text posits that play is an event that 'plays' the participant, exceeding individual control and giving rise to meaning within its process. This perspective is then applied to law, arguing that legal order is not a static system of rules but a dynamic sequence of interpretive acts where meaning is constantly being shaped. Judicial practice is therefore understood as active participation in this ongoing interpretive event, rather than mechanical application of norms. Precedent, in this view, is not a fixed answer but a living memory that acquires meaning through re-interpretation under new conditions, making interpretation central and constitutive to law itself.
The article introduces artificial intelligence not as an external tool but as an intrinsic force that intensifies and reorganizes the existing structure of legal interpretation. While AI is often seen as a tool for efficiency (e.g., retrieving precedents, predicting outcomes), this view is deemed too limited. Instead, AI systems actively restructure the field where legal meaning is understood by influencing how arguments are formed through structuring similarity, suggesting analogies, and clustering precedents. This means AI is deeply embedded within the interpretive field, shaping the conditions of possibility for legal reasoning and transforming human interpretation through its entanglement with computational logic. Interpretation, the author suggests, has always relied on mediating structures, and AI represents a new, high-speed configuration of this mediation.
This section introduces the 'principle of artificial interpretation,' defining a condition where legal interpretation is no longer solely a human endeavor but distributed across a hybrid field of human and non-human operations. Consequently, meaning becomes an 'effect of a field' rather than the property of a single subject. This shift has profound implications for understanding legal responsibility, authority, and legitimacy. If interpretation is distributed, responsibility becomes complex and cannot be singularly assigned, as judgment conditions are influenced by opaque algorithmic infrastructures. This necessitates a more reflexive approach to legal authority, acknowledging the interpretive field's complexity without abdicating responsibility, thus complicating traditional notions of accountability in law.
In this expanded and hybrid legal landscape, judicial activity is redefined as participation in a dynamic process where each decision both interprets past precedents and reconfigures conditions for future ones. This creates a recursive temporality in law, with the past folding into the future and vice versa. Artificial intelligence significantly intensifies this recursion by accelerating the circulation of precedents, generating probabilistic predictions, and creating dense networks of similarity across legal corpora. This makes law systematically anticipatory and computationally mediated. The article advocates for 'critical participation' rather than outright resistance to AI, urging jurisprudence to transform into a reflexive practice that is part of the interpretive game itself, constantly renegotiating conceptual distinctions between interpretation, computation, and prediction to remain relevant.
The article concludes that while law is not dissolving, it is transforming into a more explicitly processual and relational form, with its stability rooted in repetition and its authority in participation rather than permanence or transcendence. Returning to the childhood play analogy, the author asserts that law itself is a form of play in Gadamer's sense—an event that exceeds individual intentions but requires continuous involvement. AI, instead of interrupting this play, enters it, altering the conditions under which rules are generated and interpreted. AI functions as a 'linguistic operator,' gathering, fragmenting, and re-staging human discourses in a 'stuttering, recombinatory form,' which reorganizes existing languages of interpretation. This artificiality, the author argues, does not threaten interpretation but reveals its inherent nature as a mediated, collective, and unstable production of meaning, making the game of interpretation denser, more recursive, and visibly artificial, yet still demanding human engagement.