Should judges be replaced with AI?

Should we transfer a role that handles such an emotionally charged experience, which could ruin a life, to an artificial decision-maker that has no true grasp of free will and the context behind an action? Artificial Intelligence (AI) has in recent years, gained the ability to give advice and judgement to a certain capacity. As AI invades other sectors and threatens to replace people in jobs, we look at the judiciary and evaluate: will it be next on the chopping block with AI? If such action were to come to fruition, it would collapse the principal foundation of our judicial system.

Firstly, what are the benefits of such an action? In recent years, the criminal justice system has had a major backlog from COVID, which it has been slowly tackling, causing cases to be delayed for years and, more importantly, delaying closure for the victims. I saw this backlog for myself when I viewed sessions in my local Crown Court, where crimes committed in 2022 were only just getting to court in 2025.

This backlog reflects the number of cases which are still awaiting court sessions to be solved, rather than inefficiencies of judicial rulings. In June 2025, the backlog reached 76,957 cases (The Law Society, 2025). From this perspective, the Intelligence Automation of Judges could rapidly address the backlog, allowing for the criminal justice system to provide closure to victims quickly. Such a system would reduce bureaucratic costs as well as alleviate the tax burden on the taxpayer. For these reasons, AI appears appealing, allowing us to refocus human resources in different areas and get through cases quickly.

This attractive idea is extremely threatening to the very structure of the legal process in the UK. Such an adoption would undermine a defendant's right to have their case overseen by a fellow human. While AI in terms of knowledge exceeds many judges, its emotional intelligence is subpar for the goal. The UK relies on judges interpreting the law and putting it in the context of the specific case, giving it the delicate balance between the unemotional law and humanity, which is required for a healthy society.

The introduction of AI would destroy this balance, as seen in R v Thornton, where a woman killed her abusive husband after years of abuse, whereby a court run by humans factored this in and diminished her responsibility in the crime due to the significant factor.  An AI judge would be unable to effectively make this connection in this scenario, possibly overly punishing her despite all the abusive and mental strain which have done untold psychological damage leading up to the killing. 

In addition to this, the adoption of AI into our legal system would be a very time-consuming one. One major drawback of AI, as slightly discussed in the above paragraph, is the reliance on interpretation in our legal system. Now this system works well with human judges, but with AI, laws can no longer be as vague any more; rather, they must be extremely specific and cover multiple different scenarios for the AI to review and impose the suggested measures from the law.

What would happen if a scenario is unaccounted for in the legislative process? What is the AI to do? Let's put this in a specific scenario. Person A kills Person B after discovering that Person B had been abusing their daughter for years, and in an act of rage and revenge, in a brawl between them Person B is killed with a hammer. The most similar legislation to this, in this scenario only discusses when the killer is the victim not the killer's family member. The AI in this scenario would become too unpredictable either leading to a either too light sentence or too harsh of a sentence.

In conclusion, as the world enters its 3rd wave of automation with the use of AI, it is in societies best interest to omit the judiciary system from being a target. Such action would bring greater devastation, outweighing the positives of its adoption. The thought around this adoption should remain as a thought experiment on how efficiency in court doesn't always mean quicker.