Stuttering Law: A Manifesto on Play, Interpretation, and Artificial Intelligence – JURIST – Commentary

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If legal interpretation is no longer purely human but distributed across judges, archives, and algorithms, then who is responsible for a judgment — and on what authority does it rest? A philosophical case that AI is changing the answers.

I still remember the children in the courtyard of our apartment building. There were only two boys among a larger group of girls, and yet one of the most serious negotiations of their small world revolved around a strangely precise question: who would play the husband. What appeared, from the distance of adulthood, as a trivial or even absurd game was in fact the construction of a miniature normative universe. Roles were not simply chosen; they were argued over, redistributed, justified, contested, and occasionally imposed. The children did not merely imitate a social order that already existed outside them; they generated one in real time, with a seriousness that did not depend on adult recognition in order to be binding within its own horizon.

What is striking in retrospect is not the content of their imagination, but the structural logic of it. The game was not a space of arbitrary freedom, but a space of emergent constraint. A disagreement would immediately require a rule; a rule would require interpretation; interpretation would create asymmetries; asymmetries would demand correction; and correction would open the possibility of a new rule. In this sense, their play was already a primitive jurisprudence: not in the sense that it resembled law superficially, but in the sense that it reproduced law’s most fundamental temporal structure, namely the continuous production of normativity through situated interpretation.

Years later, I encountered philosophical descriptions of play that suddenly illuminated this memory in a different light. In particular, the hermeneutic tradition associated with Hans-Georg Gadamer—in The Relevance of the Beautiful (Die Aktualität des Schönen, 1974)—articulates play not as an activity…

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