The surprising case for AI judges

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Ipotel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're going to talk about the role AI might play in deciding legal disputes, not just doing research and drafting memos, actually deciding who's right and who's wrong and who should pay. My guest today is Bridget McCormick, the former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now the president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association.

You've probably heard of arbitration before. It's a form of dispute resolution that allows two parties to resolve conflicts outside of the formal court system using a third neutral party, the arbitrator, to negotiate a settlement. You may have never found yourself in arbitration, but you've almost certainly signed an arbitration clause in one of the many contracts and terms of service agreements that all of us have to sign all the time. Arbitration can be much faster, cheaper, and easier than going to court, so it's become a favored way of resolving disputes between businesses. It's also, as it turns out, how many employers in large corporations defend against lawsuits, because they can sneak an arbitration clause into the agreements for everything from cell phone service to smart washing machine features, or even the signing of your employment contract, which can protect them down the line from class action claims.

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