# AI and Judicial Modernization - Yadong Cui - Shanghai 2019-2020

Here's a quick tl:dr drill down on a 2020 book authored by Yadong Cui, the former secretary and President of Party Committee of Shanghai Senior People's Court, and now the secretary and President of Party Committee of Shanghai Law Society.

The background of this starts when the author delivered a keynote speech on "artificial intelligence and judicial modernization" at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 “AI and Law” Forum.

Book title: Artificial Intelligence and Judicial Modernization

Author Yadong Cui

DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9880-4

Copyright Information Shanghai People's Publishing House 2020

Publisher Name Springer, Singapore
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-32-9880-4

A - Context and perspective

The most recent background of the book prior to its mid-2019 original publication in China, starts when the author delivered a keynote speech on "artificial intelligence and judicial modernization" at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 “AI and Law” Forum.

But context itself dates back to 2014, when China’s judiciary launched a profound reform of the judicial system, aiming at “speeding up the construction of a fair, efficient and authoritative socialist judicial system through deepening the reform of the judicial system, safeguarding the rights and interests of the people, so as to make the public experience fairness and justice in each judicial case.”

Because Shanghai has always been ahead of the curve in terms of international tech reach and socio-technological constructs as domestic (and somehow international - BRI) systems of control, in turns out the Shanghai High People’s Court got the job of test pilot to break the legal tech barrier of the judicial system reform in China.

So the idea was to build a replicable and popularizable “Shanghai Experience” for the national judicial system reform, while of course it is Beijing that calls all the shots in the end. The hype generated by AI in Legaltech, and in particular judicial AI, has been on par with e.g. the hype generated around digital Yuan payment systems and blockchain in Fintech etc.

President Xi Jinping in the mid-2010's, pointed out that "China should follow the law of justice, combine the deepening of judicial system reform with the application of modern science and technology, and constantly improve and develop the socialist judicial system with Chinese characteristics."

In early 2017, the Shanghai High People’s Court again undertook the task of developing “trial-centered litigation system reform software” assigned by the central government of China. By pioneering the integration of modern science and technology such as AI and judicial practice, they pushed forward the reform of the criminal litigation system centering on trials, claiming this was intended to avoid the occurrence of cases in which people are unjustly, falsely, or wrongly charged or sentenced. And dealing with a lot of backlog of unprocessed cases (landlord disputes, individual and coporate debt, petty crime), resonating with the basic international case for Legaltech as access to justice but even more so access to the law itself.

By early 2019, the third version of “Shanghai intelligent assistive case-handling system for criminal cases” (aka “the 206 System 3.0”) had been available online since December 2018, which enables the complete case-handling procedures of criminal cases in Shanghai to be dealt with online—from case filing, investigation, approval for arrest, review, prosecution, court trial, conviction, to commutation and parole, representing a breakthrough in the deep application of AI technology in judicial field.

The 206 System, with 26 functions, has been granted 6 intellectual property rights in China.

Its four distinctive functions are as follows:

(1) Evidence standards and evidence rules guidance. This function provides the case-handling personnel with standardized, digitalized, and checklist-styled guidelines in evidence collection and fixation, which are easy for them to grasp and follow, so as to prevent the prominent problems in this procedure, such as lack of uniformly applicable evidence standards among public security organs, procuratorates and courts, nonstandard case-handling conduct, etc.

(2) Evidence review. The 206 System can review, verify, and supervise both the single evidence and the evidence chain of the whole case, and remind the case-handling investigators and officers about the problems in evidence timely, so as to ensure the factual evidence of the cases under investigation, review, and prosecution can stand the test of law.

(3) Interrogation guidance with key elements. With its questioning/interrogating models for different types of cases, the System can provide guidance to police officers during questioning or interrogating. Besides, it can help users to detect contradictions of the confessions in time, so as to guarantee the comprehensiveness, legality, and accuracy of interrogation transcripts.

(4) Intelligent court trial assistance. Through the use of AI and other high-tech tools to assist the court trial, the 206 System can ensure that “the facts of the case are ascertained in court” and “the evidence is determined in court”, so as to truly implement the substantiation of court trials, and to protect the litigant’s right of action, as well as the people’s right to know, participate, express and supervise, etc (see Chap. 5 of Practice for more functions of the System).

Early (February) 2019, is when the Chinese edition of this book 'Artificial Intelligence and Judicial Modernization' was published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House, both 2019 Chinese and 2020 English editions of the book were closely followed in China and internationally.

The book was presented by its author at various occasions:

- 2018 World AI Conference on “AI and Judicial Modernization”
- “2018 Shanghai Yearbook International Academic Forum”
- “2019 China-US High-end Forum on Civil Diplomacy” (speeches on “AI Empowering Justice”)
- various Chinese venues such as National People’s Congress Law Commission, Tsinghua University, China University of Politics and Law, Shanghai Jiaotong University, East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai School of Political Science and Law, Shanghai University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Northeast University of Finance and Economics, Wenzhou University and Shanghai Lecture Hall of Jurists.
- various foreign venues such as Stanford University and New York University o

From 2018 to May 2019, the Shanghai High People’s Court had received more than 3497 people in 133 groups from domestic and foreign delegations, including 142 people in 11 groups from overseas, to assess the system's implementation in Shanghai and in China.

According to the author, at present, the system has been popularized and applied in several provinces and municipalities in China (our comment: we don't know exactly where, and, in particular, we don't know whether Beijing has adopted it).

B - The book and system knowledge map

The book conducts a (thesis literature review style) high level inventory of the origin and global state of the art in AI, which is fair enough. The review of the Shanghai system are a again a fair high level description of the system's architecture 4 core functionalities that is perfectly intelligible for anyone familiar with legal tech and the intersection of AI and the judicial process. In particular the TRL review (technology readiness levels) on what needs to be mastered, including and not limited to e.g. NLP, is fair enough, quite optimistic (voluntary) but not misleading on the limitations and pitfalls either. So overall it's a fair enough high level job of explaining clearly the system, its key concepts, however not versing into wild raw hype: you feel somewhere the need to be accountable for actual results to the judicial system, the government, and the party, so the bandwidth for hype is indeed narrow.

C - The politically correct packaging and the virtue signaling message

What is really interesting, and that is so typical of the Shanghai vs Beijing version of good cop vs bad cop, is that the author is deliberately formatting his message for 'first principles acceptability' abroad, in particular among systems that use frameworks that aren't those of the CCCPC. So the author is quite upfront an adamant all the way that there should be some sort of "balance" between the urge to integrate tech and AI and the need to make sure that this is being done only as part of a human-remains-strongly-in-the-loop framework. Where the technology (AI, but also big data, docs processing, case management, etc.) is there to assist, but the ultimate judicial decision making process remains human-centered.

Now, if you look for example at the entire Indo-Pacific region (India + APAC) legal tech there sees some accelerating levels of adoption, though the trajectory and speed of adoption of what gets eventually re-organized with tech isn't that different from, say, the "West". However, take a country as far away from the CCCPC political system such as Japan, which may come across as much closer to the Western liberal democracy model and to a certain extent might be (it depends which segment of society and process you look at). But it's judicial system is widely known as rather "special" with a conviction rate over 90% due to a coercive system pressuring the accused to confess, then game over. Looking at Singapore, it remains pretty much inspired by the British Common Law system with a certain judicial system that is 100% Singaporean. Beyond that, countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have fully integrated religious law (Shariah) in their legal construct. As well as the architecture and processes and procedures ot their judicial system and how things are really being instructed and judged.

So, looking at the tech on one hand, and the nature of the political system on the other hand, with the history, culture, and other factors that underwrite it, we can say, oh, that's China political system anyway, and that is the case indeed. But we might want to not miss the point that it also boils down to the nature, architecture and mechanism of the judicial system and the courts, as both the instituaional interface and the operational mechanism, that "render justice" between the technological and the political.

As such, if we don't investigate deeply how the human-in-the-loop does impact the workings of the judicial system, this whole tech thing might be a gigantic red herring. In the end, decision making algorithms and judicial data management may either merely assist, somehow help leverage, or worse, be further weaponized, to make sure that the status quo prevails, and that the judicial system is aligned to serve not justice, but political order or whichever aims of the powers-that-be over the people (the people who may not necessarily be inclined toward 'freedom', 'justice', 'independence', and other such notions for which the rest of us have started revolutions and wars for).

Like for example establishing specific oversight of judges whose decisions appear to depart from what an imperfect algorithm on a less than ideal data set and reference model, said that the judgement, however professionally and "honestly" determined, "should have been" and getting said judge in hot wate with his/her superiors. So let's just not be naive about this whole arrangement.

Therefore the human-in-the-loop keeps owning the (political, judicial, or otherwise) bias, the AI is at best "assisting" bias, quite prrobably leveraging it, and at worst might as well be weaponized to further facilitate and empower bias.

And not merely for China, but for all judicial systems around the word, beyond the tech of processing data, docs, cases, judgements, etc, we also need to ask ourselves, how might the human and political architecture and mechanisms of this particular judicial, instrumentalize and weaponize AI as a tool, to further its agenda, which may not necessarily be in favor of "justice" but fulfilling rather different political and societal purposes. And again, that's a question that may be valid everywhere, not merely China.

Legally hacked and written in one unique speedy flow on a sunny early afternoon of May 2021 - absolutely not revised nor verified.