Confessions of Capitalism: The Catastrophe of Algorithmic Governmentality and the Practice of Law

Algorithms are currently something of a buzz topic, given their ever-increasing relevance in almost every sector of socio-political life. However their effect on the practice of law, and specifically the construction of legal knowledge, has largely been neglected by research. According to Morison and Leith (1992), the best legal point during litigation is often the ‘one that works’; that gets the job done persuasively and efficiently, because courts require ‘truth within given times’. Within these parameters, there is seemingly no better ‘confessor’ than an algorithm. Through a form of algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy, 2012), correlations are interpreted within big data sets, thereby producing an ‘immediately operational’ knowledge deriving from the embodiment of humans in the ‘onlife’ world (Hildebrandt, 2015). Not only does this hold persuasive power - in that algorithms are often viewed publicly as objectively ‘crunching numbers’, rather than for their ability to construct a ‘staged’ reality (Boltanski, 2011) – but algorithms are also judged upon the efficiency and economic fluidity they allow, as the legal system is subsumed into the logics of both computation and neoliberal capitalism. This paper will discuss the contemporary legal practices and developing trends that employ algorithms for economic purposes, before setting out the prospects and difficulties for critique.