# Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon Highlights the Importance of Human Judgment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

- Link: https://www.thailand-business-news.com/pr-news/chief-justice-sundaresh-menon-highlights-the-importance-of-human-judgment-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence
- Published: 2026-10-30T15:58:00+07:00
- Author: PR Newswire

SINGAPORE, Oct. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — 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 28^(th) 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.

 [⌊Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon delivering his speech at the Australian Judicial Officers Association Colloquium 2026 in Brisbane, Australia.⌉](https://mmx.prnasia.com/media/MS2024153/20261029230112EDT_image_1.jpg?id=OA3049334&p=medium600)

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon delivering his speech at the Australian Judicial Officers
Association Colloquium 2026 in Brisbane, Australia.

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](https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/news-and-resources/news/news-details/chief-justice-sundaresh-menon--speech-at-the-australian-judicial-officers-association-colloquium-2026)
for more details.

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