As AI rapidly expands across industries and societies, justice systems are struggling to keep pace and ensure enforceable rights and equal access to judicial remedies
Key takeaways:
-
-
-
AI frameworks need to keep up with implementation — While AI governance frameworks are being developed and enacted globally, their effectiveness depends on enforceable mechanisms within domestic justice systems.
-
Access to justice is essential for trustworthy AI regulation — Rights and protections are only meaningful if individuals can understand, challenge, and seek remedies for AI-driven decisions. Without operational access, governance frameworks risk remaining theoretical.
-
People-centered justice and human rights must anchor AI governance — Embedding human rights standards and ensuring equal access to justice in AI regulation strengthens public trust, accountability, and the credibility of both public institutions and private companies.
-
-
The blog was co-authored by Nate Edwards, a Program Officer at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC), where he collaborates with the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just, and Inclusive Societies team.
AI governance is accelerating across global, national, and local levels. As public investment in AI infrastructure expands, new oversight bodies are emerging to assess safety, risk, and accountability. The global policy conversation has not surprisingly shifted from principles to the implementation of meaningful guardrails and AI governance frameworks, which legislators now are drafting and enacting.
These developments reflect growing recognition that AI systems demand structured oversight and a shift from voluntary safeguards and standards to institutionalized governance. One critical dimension remains underdeveloped, however: how do these frameworks function in practice? Are they enforceable? Do they provide accountability? Do they ensure equal access?
AI governance will not succeed on the strength of international declarations or regulatory design alone; rather, domestic justice systems will determine whether it works. At this intersection, the connection between AI governance and access to justice becomes real.
In early February, leaders across government, the legal sector, international organizations, industry, and civil society convened for an expert discussion. The following reflections attempt to build on that dialogue and its urgency.
From principles to enforcement
Over the past decade, AI governance has evolved from hypothetical ethical guidelines to voluntary commitments, binding regulatory frameworks, and risk-based approaches. Due to these game-changing advancements, however, many past attempts to provide structure and governance have been quickly outpaced by technology and are insufficient without enforcement mechanisms. As Anoush Rima Tatevossian of The Future Society observed: “The judicial community should have a role to play not only in shaping policies, but in how they are implemented.”
Frameworks establish expectations, while courts and dispute resolution mechanisms interpret rules, test rights, evaluate harm, assign responsibility, and determine remedies. If individuals are not empowered to safeguard their rights and cannot access these mechanisms, governance frameworks remain theoretical or are casually ignored.
This challenge reflects a broader structural constraint. Even without AI, legal systems struggle to meet demand. In the United States alone, 92% of people do not receive the help they need in accessing their rights in the justice system. Introducing AI into this environment without strengthening access can risk widening, rather than narrowing, the justice gap.
Please add your voice to Thomson Reuters’ flagship “Future of Professionals” research, a global study exploring how the professional landscape continues to change. Share your perspective here
Justice systems serve as the operational core of AI governance. By inserting the rule of law into unregulated areas, they provide the infrastructure that enables accountability by interpreting regulatory provisions in specific cases, assessing whether AI-related harms violate legal standards, allocating responsibility across public and private actors, and providing accessible pathways for redress.
These frameworks also generate critical feedback. Disputes involving AI systems expose gaps in transparency, fairness, and accountability. Legal professionals see where governance frameworks first break down in real-world conditions, often long before policymakers do. As a result, these frameworks function as an early signal of policy effectiveness and rights protections.
Importantly, AI governance does not require entirely new legal foundations. Human rights frameworks already provide standards for legality, non-discrimination, due process, and access to remedy, and these standards apply directly to AI-enabled decision-making. “AI can assist judges but must never replace human judgment, accountability, or due process,” said Kate Fox Principi, Lead on the Administration of Justice at the United Nations (UN) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), during the February panel.
Clearly, rights are only meaningful when individuals can exercise them — this constraint is not conceptual, it’s operational. Systems must be understandable, affordable, and responsive, and institutions should be capable of evaluating complex, technology-enabled disputes.
Trust, markets & accountability
Governance frameworks that do not account for these dynamics risk entrenching inequities rather than mitigating them. An individual’s ability to understand, challenge, and seek a remedy for automated decisions determines whether governance is credible. A people-centered justice approach, as established in the Hague Declaration on Equal Access to Justice for All by 2030, asks whether individuals can meaningfully engage with the system, not just whether rules exist. For example, women face documented barriers to accessing justice in any jurisdiction. AI systems trained on biased data can replicate or amplify existing disparities in employment, financial services, healthcare, and criminal justice.
“Institutional agreement rings hollow when billions of people experience governance as remote, technocratic, and unresponsive to their actual lives,” said Alfredo Pizarro of the Permanent Mission of Costa Rica to the UN. “People-centered justice becomes essential.”
AI systems already shape outcomes across employment, financial services, housing, and justice. Entrepreneurs, law schools, courts, and legal services organizations are already building AI-enabled tools that help people navigate legal processes and assert their rights more effectively. Governance design will determine whether these tools help spread access to justice and build public trust or introduce new barriers.
Private companies play a central role in developing and deploying AI systems. Their products shape economic and social outcomes at scale. For them, trust is not abstract; it is a success metric. “Innovation depends on trust,” explained Iain Levine, formerly of Meta’s Human Rights Policy Team. “Without trust, products will not be adopted.” And trust, in turn, depends on enforceability and equal access to remedy.
AI governance will succeed or fail based on access
As Pizarro also noted, justice provides “normative continuity across technological rupture.” Indeed, these principles already exist within international human rights law and people-centered justice; although they precede the advent of autonomous systems, they provide standards for evaluating discrimination, surveillance, and procedural fairness, and remain durable as new challenges to upholding justice and the rule of law emerge.
People-centered justice was not designed for legal systems addressing AI-related harms, but its outcome-driven orientation remains durable as new justice problems emerge.
The current stage presents an opportunity to align AI governance with access to justice from the outset. Beyond well-drafted rules, we need systems that people can use. And that means that any effective governance requires coordination between policymakers, legal professionals, and the public.
You can find other installments of our Scaling Justice blog series here
