‘Full of stories’: AI, literature, and the law

New approaches to understanding the potential intersections between literary criticism and artificial intelligence continue to emerge and evolve, and to be informed by other disciplines. This chapter argues that research in the domain of AI and the law should be included in this interdisciplinary dialogue. AI is already transforming the legal landscape and, as this chapter demonstrates, both the law and significant proportions of the modern legal system are narratively configured, suggesting the potential for salient parallels in AI, literature, and the law. Indeed, the law is ‘full of stories’ (Tait and Norris 2011, 11). It is in this light that this chapter explores some of the narrative configurations in emerging AI models of ‘algorithmic justice’, legal reasoning, and adjudicative decision making. It demonstrates that the ‘frames’, ‘scripts’ and ‘schemata’ in the AI technologies and algorithms increasingly deployed in legal systems of the US, UK, and beyond, share important similarities with the cognitive frames which humans similarly use to help process narrative literature. Accordingly, it asks whether current and emerging AI models of legal knowledge, reasoning, and decision making might provide insights into AI models of literary knowledge, reading, and literary criticism – and vice versa.