From precedent to protocol: Rethinking legal authority in the age of blockchain and AI

This article analyzes how modern technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), affect the concept and nature of authority in law. Legal systems have, for most of legal history, deferred to authority based on precedent, meaning that the past decisions of courts uniquely determined outcomes of disputes. However, technologies such as blockchain, which may support peer-to-peer and decentralized networks, which will transform legal decision-making from one of reliance and appeal to precedent to one of approaches, have challenged the current authority of law based on precedent. Whether blockchain provides access to immutable and transparent records of events, which offer decentralized authority that does not rely on intermediaries playing a direct role, or whether AI allows for more efficient and data-driven law, AI also provides ways to consider accountability, bias, and transparency, as well as the limits of understanding what 'transparency' means in the decision-making process. This article will consider not whether modern technologies will replace or supplement the present legal system, but how we will come to define legal authority on protocols and algorithms, rather than past precedent of law. The linear appeal to legal precedent as our understanding of legal authority prompted the need for this examination of modern technologies and the pieces that contribute to the establishment of authority in legal governance, while maintaining the principal values of fairness, accountability, and justice.