Minds Count 2026 Lecture with Chief Justice Peter Quinlan

This is my take of the Minds Count Foundation 2026 "What the Machine Doesn't Know: Humanity and Artificial Intelligence". I was greatly appreciative of ACAP University College for inviting me to join for the night.
Then being able to ask the panel questions was great. Also, then to finish the night off with casual conversation with the Chief Justice and High Court Judge Robert Beech-Jones.

AI can process legal information at remarkable speed. But can it exercise legal judgment?

At the 2026 Minds Count Foundation Annual Lecture, Chief Justice Peter Quinlan of the Supreme Court of Western Australia argued that even sophisticated legal AI cannot fully displace human judgment because it lacks consciousness, subjective experience and what philosophers call "Qualia". For the legal profession, that limitation is not merely theoretical. It goes to the foundations of legitimacy, accountability and wellbeing.

The Conceptual Limit: Why Qualia Matters

Chief Justice Quinlan acknowledged the capacity of AI systems to process information, identify patterns and generate efficient outputs. However, he argued that legal judgment cannot be reduced to computational prediction or rule application. Law is sustained by human experience, empathy and inter-subjective understanding.

On this account, qualia is not an abstract philosophical ornament. It is part of the lived experience through which legal meaning is interpreted, contested and applied. If legal outcomes were detached from that human dimension, the law could become technically efficient yet socially alienating.

As Chief Justice Quinlan observed, if legal judgment is handed over to faster and more predictable AI determinations, the legal system risks becoming disconnected from the human qualities that created and continue to sustain it. In his words, the law may become “unrecognisable” and “inhuman”.

AI as a Critical Companion Rather Than a Substitute

The panel discussion that followed extended this theme by considering how AI might be incorporated into legal practice without diminishing professional agency. Dr Michelle Sharpe , Michael Tooma and Dr Felicity Bell each identified both risks and opportunities in the profession’s engagement with AI.

Michael Tooma’s contribution was particularly practical. He described AI as a potential “sparring partner”, a tool that can test assumptions, support quality control and broaden preparation. This framing is valuable because it positions AI as a stimulus for better human reasoning rather than as an authority to be passively endorsed.

However, that benefit depends on the organisational design. If lawyers are not given time and space to interrogate AI outputs, the technology may intensify existing pressures by encouraging the rapid rubber-stamping of machine-generated conclusions.

Accountability, Risk and the Design of Safe Legal AI

Tooma’s warning was directed to a familiar institutional risk. When AI-generated outputs are adopted without adequate scrutiny, responsibility is likely to be transferred to the lawyers least able to shape the systems they are required to use.

He drew an analogy with the early industrial revolution, when unsafe machinery caused injury but responsibility was often attributed to worker negligence rather than defective system design.

That historical comparison is instructive. Just as regulatory expectations eventually shifted upstream to require factory owners to make machinery safer, AI governance in legal practice may need to impose stronger responsibilities on those who design, deploy and profit from legal technology.

The contemporary analogue is the junior lawyer working under substantial time, billing and supervision pressures. If AI systems accelerate work without distributing responsibility fairly, they may deepen rather than resolve professional vulnerability.

Accordingly, the central issue is not simply whether lawyers should use AI, but how accountability should be structured across the entire technological and professional ecosystem. The safer approach is to require upstream actors, including technology providers and institutional adopters, to design systems that assist rather than expose end users.

Professional Formation, Wellbeing and the Future of Legal Work

Dr Felicity Bell identified a further concern. AI may not simply replace lawyers, but may reshape the professional pathway by reducing entry-level opportunities through which legal judgment is traditionally developed.

This point is significant for the long-term health of the profession. Legal expertise is not produced only through exposure to doctrine; it is also developed through supervised practice, ethical judgment, client interaction and the gradual acquisition of professional confidence. If AI removes too many formative tasks, the profession may gain efficiency while weakening the conditions under which expertise is cultivated.

Dr Michelle Sharpe added a complementary perspective, observing that lawyers’ habitual orientation toward risk may intensify anxiety about technological change. The challenge, then, is to retain critical scrutiny without allowing pessimism to become paralysis.

A constructive professional response requires both openness and discipline: openness to the ways AI may support better work, and discipline in questioning its assumptions, outputs and institutional consequences.

Conclusion: Preserving the Human Conditions of Legal Judgment

The lecture and panel together suggest that the profession’s task is not to resist AI reflexively, nor to embrace it uncritically. Rather, it is to develop forms of legal practice in which AI strengthens human judgment, supports professional wellbeing and remains accountable to the human purposes of law.

That will require more than technical literacy. It will require institutional responsibility, ethical imagination and a renewed commitment to the proposition that law is not merely a system of outputs, but a human practice concerned with judgment, responsibility and justice.

As legal AI becomes more capable, how should the profession ensure that efficiency does not come at the expense of judgment, accountability and the human purposes of law?

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