Blind Justice, Seeing Machines: AI, Prediction, and the Future of the Law. An Italian American Dialogue

The scales of justice have long been held by a blindfolded figure — an emblem of impartiality untainted by identity or prejudice. Artificial intelligence offers something different: a justice that does not avert its eyes, but watches everything, remembers everything, and predicts with statistical confidence what human judges can only weigh in conscience. Whether that constitutes progress — or its precise inversion — is the animating question of this conference.

Blind Justice, Seeing Machines brings together American and Italian jurists, legal scholars, technologists, and policymakers for a transatlantic dialogue on the integration of AI into legal systems and adjudicatory processes — challenging foundational concepts of due process, judicial independence, and the irreducibly human dimension of legal judgment.

The dialogue unfolds against a sharply asymmetric regulatory landscape. The EU AI Act classifies systems used in the administration of justice among those presenting the highest risk, imposing strict transparency obligations and prohibitions on certain automated determinations. The United States has pursued a fragmented approach, yet instructive models are emerging. The New York State Unified Court System's October 2025 Interim Policy — the first of its kind for any state court system — establishes system-wide guardrails while preserving each judge's authority to regulate AI before their own bench, affirming that AI may never substitute for judicial reasoning and that judges remain solely responsible for all decisions. The contrast between the EU's top-down risk classification regime and New York's decentralized, judge-by-judge governance model frames the central comparative question of this conference.

Italy's civil law tradition, shaped by a constitutional court of enduring influence and a rich philosophical inheritance on reason and human dignity, offers a distinctive counterpoint to the common law pragmatism governing American responses to technological disruption. Blind Justice, Seeing Machines proceeds from the conviction that the governance of AI in law is a legal problem of the first order — one that demands the full engagement of the profession on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Program Agenda

In Collaboration With

OSSERVATORI SULLA GIUSTIZIA CIVILE

CONSIGLIO DELL’ORDINE DEGLI AVVOCATI DI ROMA