The fundamental reason for establishing legal systems is to bring certainty to social life, enabling individuals to plan their actions and establish order. Photo: TUCHONG

With the accelerated advancement of science and technology, novel legal issues continue to emerge, and the legal practices addressed by legal and social science research have undergone profound transformation. In the age of AI, it is essential to explore the future directions of this research and its potential contributions to society.

The fundamental reason for establishing legal systems is to bring certainty to social life, enabling individuals to plan their actions and establish order within a society where expectations have become relatively stable. This is what German sociologist Niklas Luhmann described as the transformation of cognitive expectations into normative expectations. To enhance the certainty of legal systems and clarify the application of norms, Max Weber’s concept of the formal rationalization of law has long served as a cornerstone of legal modernization. Legal studies, accordingly, aims to bolster the certainty of legal systems. By recognizing the intrinsic connection between norm creation and norm application, legal studies contributes to shaping legal systems into frameworks that can be more accurately observed and reliably predicted. An integrative and systematic research approach can further enhance this certainty.

To demonstrate its value, legal and social science research must itself embody integrative and systematic characteristics. While achieving this has long been a challenge, recent advances in AI technology offer new possibilities. Formal rational law simplifies and organizes the complexity of modern social life into a coherent legal code, making the causal relationship between actions and consequences easier to discern. This facilitates the formation of individual expectations, behavioral norms, and normative expectations. Establishing causality allows actors and observers within legal systems to both filter relevant information and infer normative expectations from limited data. However, when the volume of necessary information becomes too great, or the web of causes and effects too complex, human analytical capacity may fall short.

In the age of AI, the human capacity to acquire and process information has expanded significantly, greatly reducing the need to streamline inputs. New technologies allow for the handling of vast datasets, shifting the focus away from causality and toward correlation. A wide range of variables may correlate with legally relevant outcomes without necessarily bearing a causal link. In the pre-AI era, most of these correlations were beyond the reach of legal systems due to technical limitations. Today, AI and big data technologies make it possible to connect and integrate large volumes of seemingly unrelated or fragmented data.

As such, improving the accuracy of correlation-based predictions becomes key to enhancing the certainty of legal systems in the age of AI. In this context, legal and social science research gain greater practical utility. The social sciences present diverse research methodologies, and when combined with legal studies, these approaches yield a deeper understanding of the factors influencing human behavior. This enables the integration of information reflecting these factors into predictive models about the human behaviors and their consequences that legal systems aim to regulate. In this way, the growing diversity and fragmentation of information no longer obstruct legal certainty. On the contrary, more perspectives contribute to more comprehensive and accurate predictions, thereby strengthening the reliability of legal systems.

A defining characteristic of legal and social science research is its broad conception of law. It views law as one component within a pluralistic normative system, rather than explaining the role of legal systems in society through a purely legalistic lens. In the age of AI, the nature of law itself is evolving. Algorithms now guide and evaluate human behavior in ways analogous to legal norms, and technological tools can directly influence human conduct. Legal and social science research is well-positioned to illuminate the interaction between legal norms and human behavior by investigating systemic social factors. Through various interdisciplinary methods, it can identify correlations among diverse factors and explore how they interact.

In this sense, the development of legal and social science research in the age of AI depends on its potential to serve as a societal and legal simulator. By incorporating an ever-expanding array of information as parameters, this simulator can predict the performance of legal systems with increasing accuracy, thereby enhancing their overall certainty.

Li Sheng is a professor from the Law School at Ocean University of China.

Edited by WANG YOURAN