Overview
- Spain’s Cendoj has introduced Captcha barriers that thwart automated agents, curbing large‑scale AI access to jurisprudence despite national and EU open‑data mandates.
- Spanish and EU frameworks establish that judicial decisions are public and should be available in machine‑readable formats, including Article 13 of Spain’s Intellectual Property Law and Directive (EU) 2019/1024 transposed by Royal Decree‑Law 24/2021.
- The EU AI Act, approved by the Council in May 2024, classifies judicial‑assistive systems as high‑risk and requires human control, and Spain’s efficiency decree confines AI to supportive roles rather than automated decision‑making.
- France’s Judilibre and the UK’s Find Case Law publish large corpora with public APIs and licensing or traffic controls that enable regulated computational analysis.
- Opinion and analysis stress a human‑augmented approach to deployment, citing concerns over algorithmic opacity and bias, and note intensifying global investment by the United States, China, the UK, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.