Mediated Decisions. Origins, uses and effects of ‘predictive justice’ algorithms on judicial processes – JUST-IA

JUST-IA aims at understanding the development and effects of algorithmic devices on the processing of cases and judicial decisions. The socio-historical part of the project deals with the genesis of these systems and the controversies, which have surrounded their development in the context of the open data public policy regarding case law. Within a STS perspective, the emerging public-private ecosystem of algorithmic justice is analyzed with an eye towards its tensions, and towards a reconfiguration of the division of legal labor, with the emergence ‘hybrid’ legaltech professions. The ethnographic part of the project targets the effects of algorithmic devices on two types of decisions, understood as remediated by them: that of judges (when fixing indemnities in particular), and that of lawyers and firms (in that case, going or not going to trial). Understanding the potential effects of such technologies on the relationship between professional actors and legal precedents, in a civil law system, is an important perspective of the project. It is an interdisciplinary approach which associates diversified sources (archives, newspapers' articles, tweets, interviews, observations) which will be the subject of cross-content analysis (notably Iramuteq and NVivo).