[Unpublished activity] Justice decoded
- Jo Szoke
- 11 hours ago
- 2 min read
This activity fits well with course book units on crime and punishment. Students study some famous legal cases, reach a verdict, and then compare it with that reached by an AI. Each of these cases received a proper final verdict in real life, so the comparison of students’, AI’s, and the real-life human judge’s rulings could serve as an interesting basis for discussion and debate.
Group | 15+/B2+ |
Time | 45-60 minutes |
Materials | Teacher mobile device with internet access, projector, case cards, role cards |
AI literacy focus | Ethical and principled use |
Tell students that they are going to act out real court hearings with some quite difficult cases. Pre-teach or elicit the following words: verdict, judge, plaintiff, defendant, attorney, jury, case, sue, take somebody to court, precedent, appeal, court hearing, sentence.
Have students draw role cards from a deck. You will definitely need a judge, a plaintiff, a defendant, and their attorneys. You can have up to 12 jury members. Alternatively, you can also have a court reporter and a police officer. If you have even more students, they can act as the public.
Project or give out the first case card for everyone to see. Give everyone 10 minutes to discuss their positions and to put together a couple of arguments. Consider the following groupings for this brainstorming stage:
The judge and the jury together
The plaintiff and their attorney
The defendant and their attorney
The public, i.e. students without roles
Make sure you act your role as an enthusiastic game master. Let the judge open the hearing and give around 10 minutes in total for the attorneys, the plaintiff, and the defendant to act out their parts, while the jury and the public are actively listening.
When time is up, ask the jury to have a quick 5-minute discussion amongst themselves, then announce their decision to the judge. The judge then gets a couple of minutes to think everything through and say the final verdict.
Now prompt the AI chatbot on the classroom device and ask it to reach a verdict as if it were the judge.
Reveal the real verdicts and have students compare the three rulings in pairs or small groups. Which one do they actually agree with and why?
As a final reflective section, ask students the following questions:
What do they think the long-term and real-life consequences are if we let AI make such decisions?
Should we let this happen? Should we keep a human in the loop at all times?
Follow-up: If students show interest in these cases, introduce another one, which is an ongoing and quite and unresolved issue at the moment. Ask them this question: “Who would be guilty if a self-driving car knocked somebody over because the algorithm didn’t “see” the person on the road?” Let them think about the question in pairs or small groups. There is no answer to this question yet, so your following questions can be (which you can even turn into a debate): - “Would you be willing to buy and use a self-driving car?” - “Would you ban self-driving cars as they are a threat to pedestrians?” You may use this article as a source or further reading: |
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