International law raises practical issues that are often related to the existence of an effective remedy1 or to jurisdiction2. People who are not lawyers often complain about the technicality of law because they see technical nuances as obstacles. Strange as it may seem, they often give their data to corporations that process them in a way that is difficult to explain. The fact is that corporations process a large amount of data to produce a result very quickly. Moreover, data seem more objective than lawyers' instincts. It has however been seen that legal facts are different from data because they have to be analysed within a given social context3. A machine processes only data that has obviously to be transcribed uniformly to enable the machine to treat it. A human being may have different feelings and can express them in various ways. For a machine, a situation, a feeling and its expression are data. Someone has to determine how to model them in a relevant way to achieve a sensible result at the end of an automated process. It is a tough task that can reveal biases since any element introduced in the model will be taken into account by the machine although a particular element may be irrelevant in a given matter4. Some topics are difficult to generalise. A lady designates a carer in case of her being incapacitated. This happens. The designated person does not have good relationships with her sibling but is not neglecting the incapacitated person. The atmosphere affects the latter. If you were to judge this case, would you appoint a different carer?5 One can see that the condition is not necessarily a key issue in incapacity matters. Incapacity or weakness cannot be treated by changing a part of the incapacitated person as one would change a part of a machine.6. Moreover, vulnerability is a multi-faced notion as you know from this blog. It is hard to model it by designing a uniform pattern that would always be relevant. Christmas reminds us that a vulnerable baby may be mighty. Mighty vulnerability is not easy to model.
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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See A jurisdictional engine. ↩
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GUIDOTTI, Riccardo, MONREALE, Anna, RUGGIERI, Salvatore, et al. « A Survey of Methods for Explaining Black Box Models ». ACM Computing Surveys [en ligne]. September 2019, Vol. 51, n° 5, introduction. DOI 10.1145/3236009. ↩
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Freely adapted from C. Cass., Civ. I, 13 July 2022, 20-20863. ↩