Can explanations prove legal compliance?

Lens adapted to this topic: Why explanations may fall short

The skeptical view argues that fluent or post-hoc explanations can create the appearance of compliance without showing the actual causes, assumptions, inputs, or responsible human judgment behind a decision. Legal reason-giving serves due process, justification, and accountability functions that ordinary end-user explanations may not perform. Compliance therefore requires operational controls and legally meaningful verification, not explanation alone.

• End-user explainability may be inadequate for legal reason-giving because legal reasons must support better decisions, due process, and meaningful human agency.
• Prevailing explainability methods may fail to reveal the actual reasons for automated decisions or support normative judgments such as legal blame.
• Transparency and documentation can be conceptually mismatched with legal accountability when they do not establish a causal connection between a process and a legally harmful outcome.
• Natural-language rationales and citations may not show whether each legal condition was actually applied; auditable, executable traces are proposed as a stronger alternative.
• Explanation rights may offer reassurance without bridging the gap between statistical inference and normative legal justification.

Featured sourceAgainst Transparency | University of Virginia School of Lawlaw.virginia.edu5 sourcesView sources