The Algorithm in the Room: Lawyers, Courts, and the AI Reckoning — The Italian and American Perspectives

Artificial intelligence has entered the law office, the courtroom, and the chambers of judges — uninvited by statute, but impossible to ignore. This program examines how two distinct legal cultures are constructing the guardrails necessary to govern that transformation, and what each can learn from the other. The EU AI Act, progressively applicable through 2027, establishes the world's first comprehensive risk-based regulatory framework for AI, classifying systems used in the administration of justice as high-risk and imposing mandatory conformity assessments, human oversight obligations, transparency requirements, and strict data governance standards — binding legal obligations with significant enforcement consequences for Italian attorneys operating within the EU legal order. The United States has pursued a markedly different path — decentralized, sector-specific, and deliberately flexible. The New York State Unified Court System's October 2025 Interim Policy, the first adopted by any state court system, establishes system-wide guardrails, limits AI tools to a pre-vetted list, mandates ongoing training, and preserves each judge's authority to regulate AI before their own bench, affirming that AI must never substitute for judicial reasoning and that judges bear sole responsibility for all decisions. The contrast is instructive: where the EU imposes uniform top-down obligations calibrated to risk, the American model relies on institutional self-regulation and judicial discretion. This program brings Italian and American attorneys, judges, and scholars into direct dialogue on these diverging frameworks, examining where they converge on core values — human oversight, accountability, transparency — and where their differences reflect deeper assumptions about the role of law in governing technology.

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