The "Death of Law"? Prof. Barton Beebe on Legal Extinction Panic and AI

How real is the fear of legal extinction today, and what is fueling it?

The rise of AI has caused many lawyers to worry about the future of their profession. If AI can perform much of their work faster, better, and cheaper, what value can human lawyers add? A substantial part of legal practice requires emotional intelligence and affective skills and is built on relationships, but what about the rest of it? The elites of the profession will probably be okay. In fact, they may greatly benefit. But hundreds of thousands of law jobs could become obsolete.

Yet there is also a deeper concern. Some legal commentators warn that AI will bring not just job losses, but the “death of law” itself, and by this they mean the end of the entire enterprise of law—the profession, the institutions, the knowledge discipline, the method of social ordering. They do not predict chaos—quite the opposite. There will be social order, but it will be imposed by computation, not law.

For now, this idea remains on the fringes of legal discourse. But with each AI breakthrough, more and more mainstream voices are also beginning to speak of collapse. As you might imagine, a lot of commentators see the “death of law” as a catastrophe. They express what I call “legal extinction anxiety”. Others, however, celebrate it as the moment when technology will finally render law obsolete. I term this perspective “legal extinction euphoria”.

Has law ever been seen as an endangered species in history before?

One of the main points of the historical study I’m completing while at the Weizenbaum Institute is to show that this isn’t the first time that law has panicked in the face of technological change. In fact, since the early 20th century, we’ve seen recurring waves of legal extinction anxiety and legal extinction euphoria all declaring the imminent “end” or “disappearance” of law. The first major wave followed the rise of administrative bureaucracy Then, surprisingly, space exploration in the 1960s triggered a huge crisis in legal thought, with as much writing about “space law” then as there is about AI today. Around 2000, the internet sparked debates over “cyberlaw” and fears that “technoregulation” would make breaking the law impossible—except for the Neos of the world. Now, AI has taken center stage. The pattern repeats.

My study asks: Why all the drama? Why do some technologies—but not others—lead legal commentators to predict law’s demise? What do these technologies represent that law either fears or desires? What purpose does this recurring narrative serve? And ultimately, what conception of law proves most resilient to technological change?

My basic historical claim is that legal thought has perceived each of the technologies I mentioned above as threatening not simply to outpace, but to replace law, and furthermore to replace the entirety of law, not just parts of it. These technologies have threatened to reduce everything that law does to nothing more than technology or to create spaces in which all rules would be technological in nature. Legal thought has reacted in part by trying to emphasize those parts of law that resist technologization.

Some experts warn against the codification of law and the use of algorithms for legal decisions. What are the risks of techno-regulation and what could be the benefits?

We already have a lot of very good commentary on this question. A well-studied risk is that algorithms trained on past decisions might reinforce existing biases, particularly related to race, gender, and class. In today's world, some might argue that at least this would preserve whatever progress we've made so far, preventing us from backsliding.

A general concern is that algorithms may never fully align with key principles of the rule of law, such as fairness, transparency, and the ability to challenge decisions. Yet we might still use them simply because they are quick and cheap. It’s a bit like asking “how much justice can you afford?”, but now the question becomes, “how much justice can we compute?” Worse yet, we may eventually decide that algorithmic law does in fact satisfy the norms of the rule of law. Instead of making technology fit our values, we might lower our standards to fit the technology.

If technology takes over more and more legal tasks, what aspects of law could remain human?

In the practice of law, human involvement will likely remain essential—for interacting with clients, overseeing AI technologies, reviewing algorithmic decisions, and handling complex cases. But more generally, in terms of our conception of law and what makes law distinctive from technology, I expect we may see a growing emphasis on the emotional, intuitive, and non-rational aspects of legal judgment—what the German jurisprudential tradition calls “Rechtsgefühl”. For various reasons, I refer to this as a shift to “aesthetic jurisprudence”, since much of the existing commentary on law’s difference from technology frames this difference in aesthetic terms.

At the same time, other commentators argue that “law is technology”. They see no issue with law merging with technology. They may even view this outcome as a net positive, making the system more efficient, less biased, and ultimately fairer than the imperfect legal structures we have now. This perspective promotes “technological jurisprudence”.

People might find that “aesthetic jurisprudence” sounds more appealing than “technological jurisprudence”. But there is a long intellectual tradition, largely rooted in German thought, that warns against the dangers of aestheticizing politics—dangers that may apply just as much, if not more so, to law.

The interview was conducted by Katharina Stefes
 

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