Yoshinobu Kano (Shizuoka University): Can AI Write Court Judgments? Legal NLP and the Future of Civil Justice in Japan

Der Vortrag findet auf Englisch statt!

About the Speaker
Dr. Yoshinobu Kano is a Professor at Shizuoka University, Japan, appointed to the Faculty of Informatics and the Research Institute of Green Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Tokyo in 2011. Dr. Kano is an expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). His work extends from LLM architecture across highly practical domains, including Medical NLP (automated psychiatric screening, EHR processing), Political/SNS NLP (online public opinion prediction) and Social/Entertainment AI (the AI Wolf project and AI-generated literature). In the Legal NLP domain, his work includes automated bar exam problem-solving, co-chairing the international COLIEE competition and JURISIN. He is also a member of the Study Group on Civil Justice in the Age of AI in Japan and is involved in the national project to make civil court judgments publicly available.

About the Topic
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced in their ability to read, reason over, and write legal texts, raising the question of how far AI can go in supporting, or even performing, judicial decision-making. In this talk, Prof. Kano will first review the progress of legal AI through our experience with the COLIEE competition and JURISIN, from legal information retrieval and entailment to automated bar exam problem-solving. He will then introduce recent developments in Japan, including the national effort to make civil court judgments publicly available, which is expected to provide an essential data foundation for legal AI research.
He will also introduce a summary of the Study Group on Civil Justice in the Age of AI, in which judges’ and lawyers’ organizations, the Ministry of Justice, and the Supreme Court took part, examined concrete use cases of AI for judges, court staff, and lawyers. Finally, Prof. Kano will present our newly launched, government-funded project on the automatic generation of court judgments.

About the Speaker Series
The Artificial Justice Speaker Series features guests working at the intersection between law, computer science, and the humanities. Neither technical nor juristic knowledge is a prerequisite for participation — the Series is aimed at anyone with an interest in critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on “Law and AI.” The event takes place on Zoom and is scheduled to last one hour.

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