Artificial Intelligence, Probabilities and Evidence

Abstract

In this paper it is held that mathematical probabilities may be critical to apply artificial intelligence to legal evidence assessment. Indeed, by studying trial decisions, we become aware that judges often use the word “probability” to justify their conclusions about the facts. When we assume this way of talking has a degree of correspondence with the methods brains use to reason about evidence, then it follows that probability theorems may be a useful and efficient tool to represent knowledge processed as well as to deal with uncertainty in the trial context. For this purpose, a sketch will be drawn of how subjective interpretation of probabilities and Bayes’ theorem could work in the legal context. Finally, these ideas will be applied to a case where an explicit probabilistic assessment of evidence was put forward by the court.

This paper is based on the presentation addressed by the author at the International Conference on “Autonomous Systems and the Law” organized by the de Lisbon Centre for Research in Private Law.