AI for Assisting Judicial Decision-making: Implications for the Future of Open Justice.

Judges and other legal adjudicators are increasingly relying on AI systems to assist them with their decision-making. This has profound implications for the judicial process and the right to a fair trial. This article considers what these developments mean for the principle of open justice. Two key rules that operationalise the principle of open justice - the rule that justice ought to be administered in public and the judicial duty to give reasons for decisions - are, in their current form, strained and perhaps broken altogether when AI is used to assist judicial decision-making. Consequently, these rules need to be modernised and recalibrated. To achieve this, theories, concepts and findings from "explainable AI" and "procedural justice theory" ought to be incorporated into these two rules so that they can better actualise open justice in the AI era. A key requirement is that appropriate, understandable explanations about how AI systems help judges to decide individual cases are provided to affected parties and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]