Jusletter IT

Legal information is primarily full of linguistic information. Even a brief review of established legal sources tells us this convincingly. Even though we have, and we increasingly need, signs and images of law in the digital environment, the dominance of the languages of law in communication about law does not appear to be receding. Successful linguistic communication requires sufficiently common languages and expressions.
On the one hand, one of the external characteristics of current EU legislation is the definition of concepts in regulations. In the structure of the legislation, the concepts follow the goals expressed at the beginning of the act. This makes reading the regulation easier, It facilitates the activities of both laypersons and experts. The language game becomes more precise.
But legal text and its concepts give, as the Finnish legal theorist, Professor Kaarle Makkonen insightfully wrote, only information about the rules. The deepest part of our legal expertise is the construction of a well-founded understanding resulting from the collection and processing of a variety of significant information. It is certainly not just a more or less formal treatment of legal concepts. We realised that after – if not somewhat before – the golden age of the jurisprudence of concepts – Begriffsjurisprudenz.
Legal concepts are always related to some legal informational environment. We are talking about systems and systems thinking. Crossing system boundaries easily leads to an incorrect legal view. Legal principles in force and their limits are not recognised.
It is necessary to keep these starting points in mind when we look at those modern artificial intelligence applications where the basic material is obtained using various statistical models of legal language. While the traditional search for text information is based on the search for characters it is now supplemented to an increasing extent by different expressions in different contexts, national and international. However, the limits on the application of the rules are much the same as before. This should not be forgotten amid our romantic enthusiasm for artificial intelligence.
The use of language models involves a certain degree of return to the era of text-based use of information systems. Artificial intelligence also provides opportunities for text-based operating systems to an increasing extent. Symbols are accompanied by texts. This is undoubtedly will have a bearing on information retrieval. We get often more, many more search results than before.
An increase in the number of search results does not necessarily increase the number of correct results; not at all. The exact match content remains unchanged. What is different is that the parent material obtained with the help of artificial intelligence can be useful in many ways in terms of legal understanding of things and at the same time in terms of excluding unnecessary information. And it is precisely identifying the right exclusions that burden s the use of our legal expertise. Even in the age of artificial intelligence, applying the law still involves an expert skill; even more than before. Law is an exact science, especially now as we witness the coming of the constitutional digital society.