Two legal firsts for Kilkenny as Law Festival set to get under way this week

A former Supreme Court judge will go up against an AI chatbot in Court No 3 of Kilkenny Courthouse on Friday – the first time a contest of the kind has been staged in an Irish courtroom.

It is one of two firsts on the opening day of the second Kilkenny Law Festival, which runs in venues across the city from Friday to Sunday, September 25-27.In Judge v Chatbot, at 5pm in the Parliament Street courthouse, former Supreme Court judge Marie Baker takes the bench.

Shane Phelan of the Irish Independent puts the questions and legal technology expert Alastair Moore runs the machine. Judge and chatbot get the same case and the same facts, and the public gallery gets to watch how each of them reasons its way to a ruling and where the chatbot goes wrong, if it does.Also on Friday, at 8pm in the Home Rule Club, Law and Disorder, the UK’s leading legal podcast, records in front of a live audience for the first time.

Former Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer and retired High Court judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn are joined by Marie Baker, her second outing of the day, on a question that has been sitting there for decades: could the women held in the Magdalene laundries have got out through the courts?

The remedy of habeas corpus is written into Article 40 of the Constitution and has been since 1937. The last laundry closed in 1996. The panel will work through what remedies were open to the women, or to anyone acting for them, and why the doors stayed shut for so long with the courts sitting a few streets away.

“Every solicitor in the country is being told a machine will be doing half their job inside five years,” said festival director Naoise Nunn.

“We decided to put it in a real courtroom with a real case and a Supreme Court judge beside it, and let people watch. Then ask yourself which of the two you’d want deciding whether you keep your house.

“The Magdalene question is the uncomfortable one. The remedy was in the Constitution the whole time. Getting two retired judges and a former Lord Chancellor to ask why it never got used is 70 years late. It still wants asking.”

Elsewhere on the programme, So You Want to be a Lawyer, on Friday at the Home Rule Club, is aimed at second-level and college students who are weighing up the profession. Serving the Papers, the festival’s own newspaper review, goes through the headlines on Suday morning. Nicola Tallant brings Crime World, Ireland’s biggest crime podcast, to the Ormonde Hotel on Saturday night for a live show.

A festival ticket at €150 covers all 20 events. Individual tickets, from €10, and the full programme are at kilkennylawfestival.com.