“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” — When William Shakespeare placed these words in the mouth of the rebel Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II, he was not mocking lawyers — he was saluting them. The line appears in a scene where a mob dreams of a world without laws, contracts, or courts. To “kill all the lawyers” is their first step toward chaos, because lawyers alone stand between anarchy and civilization. In that sense, Shakespeare’s seemingly cruel line is the highest compliment ever paid to the legal profession. It acknowledges that the rule of law — however tedious or technical — is society’s last defence against tyranny.
Yet Shakespeare was no romantic about lawyers either. His plays abound with sly, greedy “shysters” and smooth-tongued advocates who twist words for profit. Centuries later, this old distrust survives in Mario Puzo’s cynical adage: “A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Such barbs remind us that while lawyers preserve order, they can also pervert it when conscience yields to cunning. The legal profession has always lived within this paradox — the power to protect justice, and the temptation to profit from it.
From quills to code
Four centuries later, another revolution threatens to unseat the lawyer — this time not with swords or statutes, but with algorithms. Artificial Intelligence now drafts contracts, summarises case law, and predicts judgments. What began as simple legal research has evolved into systems capable of linguistic reasoning and probabilistic prediction. For many, this feels like Dick the Butcher reborn in digital form — a machine poised to “kill all the lawyers” by automating their craft. But a wiser reading sees AI as Della Street, the loyal secretary to Perry Mason — one who helps, organises, and sharpens, but never replaces.
In Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, Della Street is not a mere typist; she is the soul of Mason’s method — listening, analysing, and intuitively bridging logic with empathy. That is precisely how AI should serve the law: as a partner that enhances the human mind, not one that supplants it. AI can comb through millions of judgments in seconds, transcribe evidence instantly, and detect unseen patterns — yet it cannot feel the tremor of injustice or the heartbeat of mercy.
However, the rise of AI tools that claim to predict judicial outcomes — including those trained on the decisions of the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts — introduces a new layer of complexity. If past rulings reflect societal or institutional prejudice, AI models risk perpetuating the same inequities while presenting themselves as objective. A “neutral” prediction system might actually reinforce discrimination hidden within data. When justice becomes a probability score, one must ask: whose conception of fairness is being coded, and whose is being forgotten?
Ethics, empathy, and equity
AI may be efficient, but justice demands something deeper — empathy and moral imagination. An algorithm can calculate, but it cannot care. A judgment without feeling is a printout of facts, not a pronouncement of justice. Justice, at its noblest, is not only the application of law but also the understanding of life. “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in The Common Law (1881).
Empathy — the ability to perceive the human story behind the legal fact — transforms the cold precision of rules into the warmth of fairness. No contemporary judge embodies this ideal more vividly than Judge Frank Caprio, the former Chief Municipal Judge of Providence, Rhode Island (U.S.A.). Known globally through the television series Caught in Providence, Judge Caprio became a symbol of compassionate justice. His courtroom, often dealing with minor offences like parking violations or traffic fines, became a place where law met mercy.
As Dr. Rajendra Prasad, whose birth anniversary is celebrated as National Lawyers’ Day in India, warned on the eve of the Republic: “Whatever the Constitution may or may not provide, the welfare of the country will depend upon the way in which it is administered. If those who work it are honest and devoted, it will work well; otherwise, it will fail.” His insight remains timeless. The Constitution, like AI, is only as good as the people who operate it. No code — legal or digital — can substitute for character.
Piso’s Justice in the AI age
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman philosopher, statesman, and dramatist, recounts in De Ira a chilling episode from ancient Rome that gave rise to the phrase Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum — “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” A Roman governor, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, had sentenced a legionary to death for returning from duty without his companion. Piso reasoned that since the soldier had failed to produce the missing man, he must have murdered him. As the condemned soldier knelt before the executioner’s sword, the supposedly dead comrade suddenly reappeared. The centurion halted the execution and brought both men to Piso, expecting mercy.
Instead, Piso pronounced an even harsher verdict: all three were to die — the first soldier because a lawful sentence had already been passed; the centurion for delaying its execution; and the returned comrade for being the cause of two innocent deaths. From this grim scene arose both the maxim Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum and the term “Piso’s Justice” — justice so rigidly bound to law that it offends morality itself.
Seneca used this tale to warn that law without wisdom becomes cruelty in robes. It is a warning as relevant to AI as it was to imperial Rome. Algorithms, like Piso, apply logic without compassion; they cannot perceive when the law itself must bend to serve justice.
The growing talk of AI judges — automated systems to decide minor or procedural cases — brings this parable to life again. While such innovations promise faster case disposal and reduced backlog, they also risk reducing justice to computation. The humanitarian dimension of judging — listening, reasoning, empathizing — cannot be programmed without losing its moral essence. Ethical jurisprudence demands that AI remain an assistant, not an arbiter; a guide to reason, not a substitute for conscience.
AI and the lawyer’s future
The lawyer of the future will not compete with machines but collaborate with them. AI can search for precedent; the lawyer must interpret principle. AI can predict outcomes; the lawyer must argue for justice. This partnership demands new literacies: digital, ethical, and constitutional. Law schools must therefore train advocates who practise not only law, but law with conscience.
Between Dick’s hatred and Della’s loyalty lies the lawyer’s modern dilemma. Should AI become the digital Dick the Butcher, annihilating our profession in the name of efficiency? Or should we nurture it as a faithful Della Street — intelligent, loyal, and ethically bound? The choice will define the soul of tomorrow’s justice. If used blindly, AI will mechanise inequity; if guided wisely, it can render justice swift yet sensitive, logical yet humane. As long as conscience remains irreplaceable, civilization will still need those whom Shakespeare’s rebel feared most — the lawyers who save the world from chaos.
(Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala, and Muhammed Raees P.C. is an AI & Robotics Researcher and AI Consultant, and Founder & CTO of Edutecnicia Pvt. Ltd. Views are personal.)
