Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon Highlights the Importance of Human Judgment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
SINGAPORE, Oct. 30, 2026 /CNW/ -- The Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon of the Supreme Court of Singapore observed that while Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers significant opportunities to improve access to justice and judicial efficiency, human judgment must remain central to the administration of justice. Delivering his speech titled "AI and the Judicial Function: The Limits of Artificial Judgment" at the 28th Annual Australian Judicial Officers Association Colloquium 2026 on 9 October in Brisbane, Australia, Chief Justice Menon noted that AI has already entered the justice system through the parties, the profession and the tools used to administer our Courts.
In his speech, Chief Justice Menon posed the question of how far judges should engage with AI, for what purposes, and on what terms. He suggested that AI's role in adjudication should be calibrated to the nature of the judicial function involved -- the closer AI comes to exercising judgment, the greater the need for restraint.
He grounded his analysis in three requirements of sound adjudication: judicial integrity, procedural fairness, and institutional effectiveness. Much of the case for the judicial application of AI is about institutional effectiveness. The attraction of AI lies in its scale, its speed and its baseline reliability, seemingly enabling courts to serve more users, more quickly, while continuing to produce outcomes that are generally correct. But effectiveness alone cannot justify every use.
To examine the role AI might play within the adjudicative process, Chief Justice Menon suggested disaggregating the composite activity of adjudication into its working parts, so as to distil the values engaged by each part of the process and the trade-offs that attend different uses of AI. In his view, the case for AI is most compelling where it is used to acquire information, more qualified where AI analyses that material or proposes outcomes, and most limited where it formulates judicial reasons.
Beyond identifying the uses of AI that may be acceptable in principle, Chief Justice Menon stressed that practical questions of design and governance were no less important. He cautioned that a sound use of AI can be rendered unsafe by the design of the tool, the structure of the workflow or the habits of the user. In particular, he drew attention to three risks of human-machine collaboration: over-reliance, skills fade and hidden institutional delegation. The answer to these risks was not to retreat from AI, but to govern its use in ways that preserve meaningful human judgment and control, and he offered five observations on what this might entail in practice.
Chief Justice Menon concluded with the observation that while AI may seem highly intelligent, it is inescapably artificial. It cannot bear judicial responsibility, nor replicate the human encounter at the heart of a fair hearing. In adjudication, being human is not a deficiency to be minimised. In many ways, it is precisely the point.
Visit Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon: Speech at the Australian Judicial Officers Association Colloquium 2026 for more details.
SOURCE Supreme Court of Singapore
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