About The Workshop
SW 87-Invisible Decision-Maker in the Crisis of Legal Practice: Courts and ADR in the Age of Information Society
Convenors: Katarzyna Hanas; Patryk Patoleta; Paweł Kłos
Contact: katarzyna.hanas@mail.umcs.pl
The twenty-first century has exerted a significant impact on the sphere of legal practice in three principal dimensions. First, there has been an intensive development of instruments supporting the decision-making process, including information technology tools, among them artificial intelligence systems. Second, certain social conditions have gained importance, such as the overburdening of the ordinary court system and the crisis of the social legitimacy of the judiciary. Third, there has been a growing availability of legal information technology tools also beyond the community of professional lawyers. Taken together, these phenomena have led to the emergence of a particular situation in which the process of the application of law is subject to progressive automation and, at times, also algorithmisation. This phenomenon gives rise to a fundamental theoretical question as to who makes decisions in the contemporary world. The increasing significance of algorithmic tools makes it possible to discern the emergence of a collective thought that may be described as the “invisible decision-maker.
Legal decision-making has never been a purely technical or logical operation. Judicial rulings, arbitral awards, and mediated settlements emerge from complex interactions between legal norms, institutional frameworks, and social expectations. Judges interpret law within normative and cultural contexts, arbitrators operate within transnational regimes of party autonomy, and mediators facilitate dialogue grounded in trust and procedural fairness. In all of the cases indicated above, decision-making constitutes the result of the overlapping life experiences of the participants in the process, as situated within a particular social context.
Although AI systems can process vast legal datasets, they operate largely outside the relational and experiential dimensions that traditionally lend legitimacy to legal decisions.
This panel examines how scientific and technological developments in the information society influence interpretive authority across courts and the broad landscape of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). Contemporary legal systems increasingly rely on hybrid mechanisms combining adjudication, arbitration, mediation, negotiation, and administrative procedures. Within such pluralistic legal environments, a crucial question arises: can algorithmic systems meaningfully participate in resolving disputes that involve conflicts of values, cultural expectations, and power asymmetries?
The expansion of scientific and technological innovation, especially AI, also carries institutional consequences. Algorithmic tools promise faster and more cheaper adjudication, yet they may simultaneously shift interpretive power toward technological infrastructures and the actors who design them.
In ADR processes, traditionally valued for their flexibility and the human dimension of responding to conflict, the growing role of artificial intelligence may transform the meaning of voluntariness, autonomy, and participation. At the same time, subordinating the process of dispute management to AI tools leads to a partial exclusion of the non-decisional values of ADR, connected with the self-development of participants and the acquisition of social competences. Indeed, alternative dispute resolution methods serve not only to achieve a settlement, but also to teach logical thinking, develop social perspective, shape the ability to maintain a balance between emotion and reason, foster sensitivity to the significance of time in decision-making, and strengthen dispute resolution skills as well as other social competences.
From a theoretical perspective, these developments suggest a broader crisis of legal practice in the information society. Judges, arbitrators, mediators, and lawyers may increasingly act not only as decision-makers but also as supervisors of algorithmic systems and guardians of procedural legitimacy. The panel, therefore, explores how the rise of AI reshapes both the practice and the theory of legal decision-making, raising fundamental questions about responsibility, authority, and the human foundations of justice.
