What happens when artificial intelligence begins to disrupt the order of legal reasoning?
That was the question at the heart of NTU College of Law’s keynote lecture in 2025, when Professor Kevin D. Ashley—a pioneer in AI and Law from the University of Pittsburgh—visited Taipei to share his decades of research on case-based legal reasoning. The session was chaired by Professor Sieh-Chuen Huang, who noted that her own course design had been inspired by Professor Ashley’s work and invited students to reflect on how legal education can balance order and innovation in the age of AI.
Professor Ashley guided the audience through the evolution of AI-based legal reasoning—from the early Value Judgment-based Argumentative Prediction (VJAP) model that required painstaking manual knowledge modeling, to modern generative systems capable of producing legal arguments autonomously. He reminded the audience that “highlighting is not explaining”—that genuine legal reasoning requires interpretation and justification, not merely prediction.
In his recent Multi-agent Argument Framework, multiple AI agents simulate the roles of plaintiff, defendant, and judge using argument-scheme-based prompting to reconstruct courtroom dialogue and advance explainable legal AI. Demonstrations revealed how models can identify canonical factors and assess their magnitude, even uncovering unexpected patterns—such as a correlation between packaging appearance and criminal intent in drug cases. These findings suggest that legal knowledge itself is in motion, constantly breaking apart and recombining into new interpretive structures.
For students, the lecture was more than an introduction to advanced research—it was a lesson in navigating uncertainty. They learned to engage critically with AI, preserve ethical judgment amid technological disruption, and view the law as a dynamic system of evolving meanings. As Professor Huang concluded, generative AI exposes the hidden reasoning and values underlying judicial decisions, embodying the entropy of knowledge—where law continually regenerates itself between order and innovation.
