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Towards Ethical Judicial Analytics: Assessing Readability of Immigration and Asylum Decisions in the United Kingdom

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Progress in Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12981))

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Abstract

Motivated by the broader issues of open justice and access to justice, this paper explores the ethical application of judicial analytics through the lens of an assessment of readability of written judicial decisions. To that end the paper aims 1) to review and reproduce for the UK context previous work that assesses readability of legal texts, and 2) to reflect critically on the ethical implications of applied judicial analytics. Focusing on the use case of assessing the readability of judicial Immigration and Asylum decisions in the UK, we put forward recommendations for ethical judicial analytics that aim to produce results that meet the needs of and are accepted by the stakeholders of the legal system.

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/P000630/1]. We thank Gregory Tourte for his valuable technical contributions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be noted, however, that readability formulas were never meant as a writing guide, though writing guidelines can be deduced accordingly [21].

  2. 2.

    Short for ‘Simple Measure of Gobbledygok’ [see 42].

  3. 3.

    Others do not find an effect of the type of judicial retention on opinion clarity [22].

  4. 4.

    Note that others find decreasing readability over time [13, 42].

  5. 5.

    Checking the robots.txt-file revealed no restrictions on such scraping activity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Laura Scheinert

  2. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Emma L. Tonkin

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  1. Laura Scheinert
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Correspondence to Laura Scheinert .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ISEP/GECAD, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Goreti Marreiros

  2. IST/INESC-ID, University of Lisbon, Porto Salvo, Portugal

    Francisco S. Melo

  3. DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Nuno Lau

  4. FEUP/LIACC, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Henrique Lopes Cardoso

  5. FEUP/LIACC, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Luís Paulo Reis

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Scheinert, L., Tonkin, E.L. (2021). Towards Ethical Judicial Analytics: Assessing Readability of Immigration and Asylum Decisions in the United Kingdom. In: Marreiros, G., Melo, F.S., Lau, N., Lopes Cardoso, H., Reis, L.P. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12981. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86230-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86230-5_5

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