ABSTRACT

This essay addresses a version of Jerome Frank’s question – ‘Are Judges Human?’ – asking instead: are human judges necessary? It begins, in section II, by outlining the technological developments which inform the view that they are not and critically evaluates the juristic position that seemingly endorses it. That position is labelled ‘technological evangelism’ and it consists of three claims about law and adjudication: the certainty, determinacy and partiality claims. Section III shows that these three claims are utterly incompatible with what it calls standard and non-standard views of adjudication and law, while section IV considers some ways in which proponents of technological evangelism might try to reject standard and non-standard views. That section concludes that no plausible efforts have so far been made by technological evangelists to reject standard and non-standard views, and that those views therefore maintain their existing explanatory and normative priority. The overall conclusion of the essay is that technological evangelism is not a critical explanatory and normative engagement with law and adjudication as we know them, but an effort to replace them: not a game-changing intervention, but a game-ending one.

摘要

本文解决了杰罗姆·弗兰克问题的一个版本——“法官是人吗？” – 相反地问：人类法官是否必要？它在第二节中首先概述了技术的发展，这些发展表明了技术的发展并非如此，并批判性地评估了看似支持它的法律立场。这一立场被称为“技术福音主义”，它由关于法律和裁决的三个主张组成：确定性、确定性和偏向性主张。第三节表明，这三种主张与所谓的审判和法律的标准和非标准观点完全不相容，而第四节则考虑了技术传播的支持者可能试图拒绝标准和非标准观点的一些方式。该节的结论是，迄今为止，技术传播者尚未做出任何合理的努力来拒绝标准和非标准观点，因此这些观点保持其现有的解释性和规范性优先权。本文的总体结论是，技术传播并不是对我们所知的法律和裁决的批判性解释和规范性参与，而是一种取代它们的努力：不是改变游戏规则的干预，而是结束游戏的干预。