It is too early to definitively predict how generative artificial intelligence (‘AI’) will affect the law and the legal profession. How much of the hype will come to pass, or whether the effects of AI will be revolutionary or evolutionary is yet unknown. Although the extent of those effects may not be fully evident today, early glimpses show the potential for structural disruption is real, pervasive, and likely to be far-reaching. This paper explores four research questions, explored strategically in a contested internationally underdeveloped regulatory environment — with significant regulatory lag in Australia — amidst vast and rapid technological change. It posits that AI is not ‘intelligent’ of itself but that enterprises that deploy AI tools can then act intelligently. This objective requires updated enterprise governance frameworks. It also posits that potential convergence of AI and legal linguistics is a new scholarly field which could open the path to Artificial General Intelligence, a requirement for legal utility beyond prosaic applications. This paper develops the research questions into original contributions in modern enterprise governance and the necessary conjoining of AI and legal linguistics. It identifies a process of ‘enculturation’ as AI technology and legal stakeholders learn about each other globally. ‘Enculturation’ facilitates the ‘myriad moments’ — encountered in creative and artistic spirits implicit in negotiations and dealing with the unexpected in court. It establishes that future legal stakeholder utility is derived from the enhancement and/or replacement of sentient human intelligence rests upon the confluence of logic, plain language, and law, underpinned by a command of ethics, linguistics, legal linguistics and linguistics engineering. The paper then provides Digital Readiness guidance for legal stakeholders including directors, trustees, practitioners, arbitrators and judicial officers, and detailed proposals for the development of Australian law as means of reducing legal risks.
This article analyses the development of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) by the Australian Taxation Office (‘ATO’) which has, to date, focussed on increasing the likelihood of detecting taxpayer non-compliance. It finds that higher rates of detection should reduce tax crime and hence the tax gap. However, detection does not distinguish fraud and evasion from mistakes and errors. Combined with low tax morale, simplicity and literacy among Australian taxpayers, this is likely to reinforce a culture of fear, especially among individuals and small businesses. Fear-based systems undermine voluntary compliance. This article therefore argues that, without parallel investment in AI models targeted at improving tax morale, simplicity and literacy, the ATO’s detection models risk deteriorating voluntary compliance. This article recommends that the ATO should broaden its use of AI to address these issues and suggests a number of new AI-driven solutions which the ATO could implement. This analysis also provides useful insights for other public departments and global tax administrators implementing AI into their systems and services.
Abstract This article argues that the legal profession's existing duties of competence, supervision, candour, confidentiality, and procedural fairness provide the necessary framework for integrating generative AI into legal practice, without requiring a wholly new regulatory paradigm. Narrowing its focus to transformer-based large language models, the article examines the 'fake law' phenomenon, where models generate plausible but non-existent authorities, and traces its implications for miscarriages of justice, particularly where adversarial safeguards are thinnest: self-represented litigants, resource-constrained parties, and off-record settlements. It then considers AI in adjudication, arguing that transparency, contestability, and human-authored reasons remain non-negotiable for judicial legitimacy. The central recommendation is disciplined augmentation, not automation: AI should operate within the profession's existing load-bearing beams through auditable workflows, clear disclosure norms, and continuous education. Used with discipline, AI can strengthen practice; used without it, it risks eroding the trust and outcomes the profession exists to protect.
This article focuses on the core judicial role of giving reasons for a judge’s decision and the use of generative artificial intelligence (‘GenAI’) tools based on LLMs in the crafting of judgments. Considering specifically GenAI and judgment writing in common law systems, it deals with the connection between the act of decision-making and the giving of reasons for that decision. Our argument is that judgment writing should remain the domain of human judges, for reasons that are both institutional (the impact on the judicial system) and individual or processual (the impact on judges performing their roles). We seek to analyse the nature and extent of judicial use of GenAI tools that preserves this as a human domain. Ultimately, we conclude that it is not appropriate to use GenAI for judgment writing, but peripheral or adjacent uses may be supportable, provided they do not undercut the core judicial role.
This article advances a philosophical thesis about the ontological structure of international law: that the international legal system possesses an intrinsic unity, while the pluralism observable in its regional, cultural, and doctrinal variations constitutes an accidental property in the technical Aristotelian sense; a contingent feature that does not alter the essential nature of the system. Drawing on the substance/accident distinction as developed in Aristotelian metaphysics and refined in the Avicennian tradition, the article argues that the validity of international legal norms inheres in the system as a whole, not in any of its regional manifestations. The Eastern perspective on international law, examined here as a paradigm case, does not constitute a parallel or competing legal order; it represents one expression among several of the same underlying normative structure. The article distinguishes carefully between formal unity (shared secondary rules), substantive unity (peremptory norms reflecting fundamental values), and ontological unity (the essential character of the legal system as such), arguing that the first two rest upon the third. It proposes five practice-level criteria – shared sources, reciprocal recognition, common validity-conferring structures, institutional interoperability, and mutual intelligibility of legal argumentation – whose cumulative satisfaction supplies the strongest available evidence of that ontological unity, and whose joint failure would defeat the thesis. The article engages directly with the postcolonial critique that universalism reproduces imperial logic, and contends that genuine ontological universalism, which welcomes diverse manifestations, must be distinguished sharply from the false universalism that imposes one tradition’s contingent features as universal essence. Readers who resist the metaphysical commitment may read the substance/accident framework as a heuristic for distinguishing constitutive from contingent features of legal practice; the substantive thesis is the same in either register.
