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Abstract AI & Law as a concept differs from the general AI applications. Not being an application of “AI in law” strictly, it is instead a combination of the AI technology rationality and the formal rationality of the legal practice. It profoundly understands and follows the dictates of the legal operation. Within the framework of the rules, the theory, technology, and application of AI are introduced into the legal practice to assist legislation, trial, the administration of justice, and to replace the repetitive and inefficient legal tasks. The technical mechanism of AI & Law is the transformation from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence and subsequently leads to legal decision-making. This process requires feeding big legal data and knowledge to the machine, providing theories, technologies, and methods for solutions to requirements of legal practice, rather than simple informatization and platformization. The theory and technological evolution of AI & Law indicates its evolutionary route. The theories of legal reasoning and legal argumentation constitute the theoretical source of AI & Law, forming the technical distinction between symbolism and connectionism of AI & Law.The future development of AI & Law may face new challenges at the theoretical, technical and practical levels. At the theoretical level, the deep integration of law and AI needs to be explored continuously in jurisprudence. The connectionist AI & Law also faces the ethical issues of algorithmic discrimination and inexplicability. Hence, it is imperative to formulate a new approach for the protection of privacy and personal information, and to develop rules for the operation or use of AI & Law systems. In the perspective of operational mode, the model of replacing legal personnel with AI would be overturned, and AI & Law could return to a new “human-centered” cooperative pattern. From the perspective of technology and practice, AI & Law illustrates a strong trend of integration of symbolism and connectionism. In the field of intelligent legislation, it expands applications such as intelligent legislation examination, legislation argumentation and evaluation, along with legislation drafting and prediction. In the field of intelligent justice, it conducts an in-depth research on critical technological systems, judicial knowledge graphs, automated reasoning for proofs of case facts, and several other applications.The precise scientific intention of AI & Law strengthens the foundation of the entire AI & Law research, enabling theoretical construction, technology research, and application practice to match the most basic conceptual category system. We also need to be soberly aware that AI & Law has experienced numerous challenges in development and need to be alert to the impact of cyclical changes in the development of the discipline of AI & Law. To maintain a stable and sound development trend of AI & Law research in China, it is necessary to understand the evolution of the theories and technologies of AI & Law, learn its achievements and shortcomings in historical development, and avoid mechanical repetitions of the previous paths. AI & Law research also needs to fully recognize the potential and limitations of AI, follow the laws of legislation and justice, and explore new paths for AI to empower the legal practice deeply. More importantly, it is necessary to stimulate the source of the intersection of law and AI, attract more legal and AI experts into mutually beneficial cooperation, and promote AI & Law to follow the road of interdisciplinary development.
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Received: 18 April 2022
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2022, Vol. 52 
