SINGAPORE:
"Occasionally, when I go look at the social media feeds, I think there is still a large number of people who comment without even having read the summaries, and they might have read a headline, and then based on the headline, they jump to various conclusions," the Chief Justice said.
Speaking at a wide-ranging interview with the local media at the Supreme Court on Friday (May 22), the 64-year-old said that he does not believe this trend is widespread and cautioned against overreacting to it.
However, he warned that social media has contributed to a broader, long-term problem of "truth decay" by allowing anyone with mass reach to propose their own version of facts.
"Anyone now has access to mass media and mass reach, and it gives you the opportunity and the platform to pontificate on what you want to pontificate on, to propose the viewpoint that you think is true," he said.
This is a "huge challenge" for the courts, which are fundamentally truth-seeking institutions focused on discerning truth and making verdicts based strictly on the evidence before them.
In the two-hour interview, Chief Justice Menon delved into several topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), the sustainability of legal practice and the importance of public trust.
The interview comes as the judiciary marks its bicentennial milestone, celebrating 200 years since the Second Charter of Justice 1826 established the modern legal and judicial system in Singapore.
When asked by CNA if he had any retirement plans, he declined to speak about himself, choosing instead to emphasise the resilience of the judiciary as an institution that does not depend on any single leader.
Under the Constitution, the standard retirement age for Supreme Court judges, including the Chief Justice, is 65, though there are provisions for extensions.
On the matter of truth decay, Chief Justice Menon traced the phenomenon of how the loss of common space over time has created problems for society.
He cited an interview by former US Senator Ben Sasse to the New York Times on how the boom in the number of US news outlets led to a fragmentation of audiences as echo chambers grew.
This, he believes, is a significant contribution to the breakdown of truth in the US because people no longer believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, he said.
If citizens lose their faith in courts as objective truth-seeking institutions, the consequences go beyond Internet trolling.
"If you have a situation where most people believe, rightly or wrongly, they believe that the courts are making their decisions in some other way than trying to discern the truth from the evidence, you have a huge breakdown, a breakdown of confidence in the courts, breakdown of order in society," he said.
This is part of why the judiciary makes sure it gives reasons for its judgments and decisions and attempts to make sure they are explained and accessible, he said.
It does so through providing case summaries for court judgments, with the goal to make sure that summaries are comprehensible to a layperson.
"I always make the point that you write judgments for a range of audiences, and it's not the case that you're writing judgments only to make law and only to speak to lawyers," said Chief Justice Menon.
"You're also writing judgments to speak to the parties, and more importantly, in a sense, you're writing judgments to speak to your country."
He then said the courts have set up an Access to Justice division with the aim to make the judiciary more "user-centric".
Chief Justice Menon said that when most people think of access to justice, they think only of pro-bono work, which aims to bridge the gap between those who have the resources to access legal services versus those who don't.
Access to justice is much more than that, he said. It includes an awareness of the courts and what they do.
To this end, the division's main focus is to think of all the ways a court user might find obstacles or impediments to accessing justice, including the use of plain English in judgments and the way letters are written.
In the past, letters from the court were written with lawyers in mind, which meant they came full of jargon and lingo. Now, letters have also been redesigned with self-represented people and laypeople in mind.
"We had a project to look at how to redesign the way our letters look with highlights and boxes and different forms to emphasise the key things ... How do we make sure that the recipient can see that information, understand it, and find it quickly at that level? That's access to justice," said Chief Justice Menon.
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon speaking to the media in the judges' dining room at the Supreme Court on May 22, 2026. (Photo: CNA/Syamil Sapari)
On the topic of AI in courts, Chief Justice Menon spoke at length about how the technology has also helped improve access to justice, but still has a "jagged edge".
Giving a broad picture of how the judiciary is deploying AI, the Chief Justice referred to a "traffic light model".
The red light refers to areas the judiciary will not even consider using AI in, while green describes areas they are more open to, and amber is for areas that require cautious evaluation.
Presently, AI is given the green light in small claims tribunals to help self-represented people translate and organise their documents.
For example, AI is freely used - with compliance to the courts' published guidelines - for things like summaries of documents and translation.
The courts are also looking at other possible ways to deploy AI, such as by using it to suggest maintenance figures in divorce cases.
Other amber areas include discussions on whether it is safe to deploy a tool to collate an argument or draft an argument for a layperson, or for a judge to use AI to summarise hundreds of pages of submissions.
But a clear red zone for the use of AI is when there is an exercise of judgment involved, which the Chief Justice said is a part of the judges' task that "really cannot be delegated".
"At a variety of levels, as human beings, when you come before the law and you stand before (a judge), you want to feel that the person who judges you understands your emotions, understands your life, understands your situation, and is able to judge those imponderables," he said.
Humans can do so in a way that reflect a human instinct that no machine can replicate, however much AI tries to mimic the appearance of that instinct, said the Chief Justice.
Ultimately, the judiciary is not there to simply process information or give answers. It also involves a mix of attributes that a judge has, such as an independence of mind, understanding of the human condition, qualities such as impulse, emotion and youth, and morality.
In that regard, while AI mimics the work of a lawyer, "nobody can actually tell you how it does it", said the Chief Justice.
"I think that's a concern with law, because I think law is not just about outcomes. We depend not only on the outcomes, but we depend on understanding how we reach those outcomes. That's a very important part of accountability. It's a very important part of legitimacy," he said.
As such, young lawyers who come to rely on AI may end up bypassing an essential step of repeated, manual work that forms the foundation for crucial lawyering skills.
"Most of us in my generation, certainly, and even up to 10 years ago, most lawyers would have formed their legal skills, their reasoning abilities through iterative work," said Chief Justice Menon.
"You keep doing the drafting, the research, the reading, and over time you develop a method, a legal method of analysis, and it's going to be a real challenge for us to figure out how we deal with the generation of people who have gone through their legal training entirely in AI," he said.
He then noted that based on the fact that ChatGPT grew in prominence in Dec 2022, to the current crop of new lawyers, "AI would have been a very significant part of their university experience".
Chief Justice Menon said it must be watched closely how AI impacts the formation and acquisition of legal skills that are an integral part of lawyering.
"We have to start imagining the qualities of the lawyers of tomorrow, where what you are going to want is not just legal knowledge and legal skills, but an ability to work with technology in order to multiply the potential of your legal skills and knowledge," he said.
"I think we are searching for the answers to that."
Continue reading...
"Occasionally, when I go look at the social media feeds, I think there is still a large number of people who comment without even having read the summaries, and they might have read a headline, and then based on the headline, they jump to various conclusions," the Chief Justice said.
Speaking at a wide-ranging interview with the local media at the Supreme Court on Friday (May 22), the 64-year-old said that he does not believe this trend is widespread and cautioned against overreacting to it.
However, he warned that social media has contributed to a broader, long-term problem of "truth decay" by allowing anyone with mass reach to propose their own version of facts.
"Anyone now has access to mass media and mass reach, and it gives you the opportunity and the platform to pontificate on what you want to pontificate on, to propose the viewpoint that you think is true," he said.
This is a "huge challenge" for the courts, which are fundamentally truth-seeking institutions focused on discerning truth and making verdicts based strictly on the evidence before them.
In the two-hour interview, Chief Justice Menon delved into several topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), the sustainability of legal practice and the importance of public trust.
The interview comes as the judiciary marks its bicentennial milestone, celebrating 200 years since the Second Charter of Justice 1826 established the modern legal and judicial system in Singapore.
When asked by CNA if he had any retirement plans, he declined to speak about himself, choosing instead to emphasise the resilience of the judiciary as an institution that does not depend on any single leader.
Under the Constitution, the standard retirement age for Supreme Court judges, including the Chief Justice, is 65, though there are provisions for extensions.
On the matter of truth decay, Chief Justice Menon traced the phenomenon of how the loss of common space over time has created problems for society.
He cited an interview by former US Senator Ben Sasse to the New York Times on how the boom in the number of US news outlets led to a fragmentation of audiences as echo chambers grew.
This, he believes, is a significant contribution to the breakdown of truth in the US because people no longer believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, he said.
If citizens lose their faith in courts as objective truth-seeking institutions, the consequences go beyond Internet trolling.
"If you have a situation where most people believe, rightly or wrongly, they believe that the courts are making their decisions in some other way than trying to discern the truth from the evidence, you have a huge breakdown, a breakdown of confidence in the courts, breakdown of order in society," he said.
This is part of why the judiciary makes sure it gives reasons for its judgments and decisions and attempts to make sure they are explained and accessible, he said.
It does so through providing case summaries for court judgments, with the goal to make sure that summaries are comprehensible to a layperson.
"I always make the point that you write judgments for a range of audiences, and it's not the case that you're writing judgments only to make law and only to speak to lawyers," said Chief Justice Menon.
"You're also writing judgments to speak to the parties, and more importantly, in a sense, you're writing judgments to speak to your country."
A MORE USER-CENTRIC JUDICIARY
He then said the courts have set up an Access to Justice division with the aim to make the judiciary more "user-centric".
Chief Justice Menon said that when most people think of access to justice, they think only of pro-bono work, which aims to bridge the gap between those who have the resources to access legal services versus those who don't.
Access to justice is much more than that, he said. It includes an awareness of the courts and what they do.
To this end, the division's main focus is to think of all the ways a court user might find obstacles or impediments to accessing justice, including the use of plain English in judgments and the way letters are written.
In the past, letters from the court were written with lawyers in mind, which meant they came full of jargon and lingo. Now, letters have also been redesigned with self-represented people and laypeople in mind.
"We had a project to look at how to redesign the way our letters look with highlights and boxes and different forms to emphasise the key things ... How do we make sure that the recipient can see that information, understand it, and find it quickly at that level? That's access to justice," said Chief Justice Menon.
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon speaking to the media in the judges' dining room at the Supreme Court on May 22, 2026. (Photo: CNA/Syamil Sapari)
AI USE IN COURTS
On the topic of AI in courts, Chief Justice Menon spoke at length about how the technology has also helped improve access to justice, but still has a "jagged edge".
Giving a broad picture of how the judiciary is deploying AI, the Chief Justice referred to a "traffic light model".
The red light refers to areas the judiciary will not even consider using AI in, while green describes areas they are more open to, and amber is for areas that require cautious evaluation.
Presently, AI is given the green light in small claims tribunals to help self-represented people translate and organise their documents.
For example, AI is freely used - with compliance to the courts' published guidelines - for things like summaries of documents and translation.
The courts are also looking at other possible ways to deploy AI, such as by using it to suggest maintenance figures in divorce cases.
Other amber areas include discussions on whether it is safe to deploy a tool to collate an argument or draft an argument for a layperson, or for a judge to use AI to summarise hundreds of pages of submissions.
But a clear red zone for the use of AI is when there is an exercise of judgment involved, which the Chief Justice said is a part of the judges' task that "really cannot be delegated".
"At a variety of levels, as human beings, when you come before the law and you stand before (a judge), you want to feel that the person who judges you understands your emotions, understands your life, understands your situation, and is able to judge those imponderables," he said.
Humans can do so in a way that reflect a human instinct that no machine can replicate, however much AI tries to mimic the appearance of that instinct, said the Chief Justice.
Ultimately, the judiciary is not there to simply process information or give answers. It also involves a mix of attributes that a judge has, such as an independence of mind, understanding of the human condition, qualities such as impulse, emotion and youth, and morality.
AI BYPASSES CRUCIAL LAWYERING SKILLS
In that regard, while AI mimics the work of a lawyer, "nobody can actually tell you how it does it", said the Chief Justice.
"I think that's a concern with law, because I think law is not just about outcomes. We depend not only on the outcomes, but we depend on understanding how we reach those outcomes. That's a very important part of accountability. It's a very important part of legitimacy," he said.
As such, young lawyers who come to rely on AI may end up bypassing an essential step of repeated, manual work that forms the foundation for crucial lawyering skills.
"Most of us in my generation, certainly, and even up to 10 years ago, most lawyers would have formed their legal skills, their reasoning abilities through iterative work," said Chief Justice Menon.
"You keep doing the drafting, the research, the reading, and over time you develop a method, a legal method of analysis, and it's going to be a real challenge for us to figure out how we deal with the generation of people who have gone through their legal training entirely in AI," he said.
He then noted that based on the fact that ChatGPT grew in prominence in Dec 2022, to the current crop of new lawyers, "AI would have been a very significant part of their university experience".
Chief Justice Menon said it must be watched closely how AI impacts the formation and acquisition of legal skills that are an integral part of lawyering.
"We have to start imagining the qualities of the lawyers of tomorrow, where what you are going to want is not just legal knowledge and legal skills, but an ability to work with technology in order to multiply the potential of your legal skills and knowledge," he said.
"I think we are searching for the answers to that."
Continue reading...