RoboJudge 1932

In the legal community, judicial decision-making aided by or based on artificial intelligence is a hot topic. RoboJudge is the catchword, and you come across articles and seminars titled “Robojudges – the future or fiction?” and the like. When I attended a panel discussion on the topic recently, I recalled reading a similar thought many years go. It was a piece by Kurt Tucholsky, one of the most important journalists of the Weimar Republic (and a lawyer by training), published in 1932:

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An Average Legal Career in Weimar: Because They Know What They Are Doing

Bildschirmfoto 2020-05-24 um 19.00.56Recently, I read two biographies of German lawyers in the early 20th century – a real and a fictitious one.  In last week end’s post, I wrote about the historic one, Ronen Steinke’s biography of Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor who brought Auschwitz and – indirectly – Adolf Eichmann to trial, which has recently come out in an English translation. I re-read the Fritz Bauer biography alongside Ottwald’s “Because They Know What They Are Doing. A German justice novel” (Denn sie wissen, was sie tun. Ein deutscher Justizroman), first published in 1931 and newly edited in 2018. Continue reading