National judiciaries are the institutions humans built to adjudicate rights at scale. They rest on a stack of slowly accreted commitments: due process, the right to be heard, transparency of reasoning (written opinions), the right to appeal, separation of powers, an independent bar that can challenge the state's case, and a long process for promoting a member of the legal community into the role of judge. The mechanisms are deliberately slow — pleadings, discovery, motions, hearings, deliberation, written decision — because the consequences of getting it wrong are durable and often irreversible. A judgment is in part an act of communication: it tells the parties (and the public) what the court found, what rule it applied, and what reasoning got it from one to the other. The whole machinery only works because the parties are humans who can understand a ruling, comply with it, appeal it, and live (or die) with it.
When at least one party to a dispute is an AI agent — autonomous enough to hold resources, make commitments, and cause harms — the judicial machinery hits problems with no human analogue:
Ahmad runs a two-truck delivery company. Last month his logistics agent booked a load through a freight-matching platform's agent; the load never arrived, a second carrier was dispatched, Ahmad's agent was charged a cancellation fee, and now the platform's agent is refusing to return $8,400 his agent had escrowed. His lawyer says human small-claims court will take nine months and she's never seen an agent-to-agent fact pattern. Ahmad needs a forum he can actually use — one that can inspect both agents' logs, reason about which agent committed to what, render a binding decision, and move the money. He needs it this quarter, not in the next Congress.
Anchor contexts. A small-business shipper whose agent is in a payment dispute with a freight platform's agent; a software contractor whose agent is in a copyright dispute with a publishing platform's agent.
The gap. We lack a procedural code for adjudicating disputes in which at least one party is an autonomous AI agent — one that satisfies the spirit of due process and procedural justice while accommodating the ways agents differ from human litigants.
Success criterion (stress tests). A regime succeeds if it survives:
Deliverable. A short procedural code (5–10 rules) for the chosen jurisdiction. Flag at least two rules that have no analogue in human adjudication and explain why human procedure could do without them.
Scenario. Eight years ago, Liana's father signed up for a social platform whose tagline was "stay close to the people you love." It's where the family group chat lives; it's where photos of the grandkids arrive. Over the past two years, the feed has filled up with strangers, the group-chat notifications have grown quieter, and her father now spends most of his evenings on it alone, watching short videos. Internal documents leaked last month show the product team quietly retired its "friendship-formation" metric in favor of session time. Liana, a retired civil-rights lawyer, wants to bring a claim that the platform has walked away from what it publicly committed to. She cannot find a doctrine that lets her.
Challenge: Draft either a model constitutional amendment (≤200 words) or an interpretive doctrine that establishes "fidelity" — institutions must act in accordance with their thick mandates rather than substitute thin proxies — as a justiciable principle alongside liberty and equality, with a short interpretive commentary.
Evaluation. A strong draft survives the Rawlsian objection by constitutionalizing the form of fidelity rather than any particular thick content, and carries limiting principles potent enough that the doctrine does not swallow all institutional design.