From Kafka’s Courts to AI Tribunals: Bureaucratic Alienation and the Future of Justice

The Trial furnishes a diagnostic lens—opacity (epistemic), arbitrariness (normative), alienation (experiential)—for assessing AI-mediated governance in law and administration. Using literary hermeneutics, critical legal theory, and normative jurisprudence, the article maps this grid onto three emblematic systems—COMPAS (US), Chinook (Canada), and China’s social credit—showing how “black-box” procedures displace judgment, entrench structural bias, and erode due process. It evaluates partial remedies in the EU AI Act, GDPR, and UNESCO’s AI Ethics Recommendation, and specifies safeguards centered on transparency, contestability, accountability, and dignity (TCAD). The article concludes by flagging risks from large language models—fabricated citations, provenance-free drafting, and bias propagation—and by outlining TCAD-aligned controls to preserve agency and legal recognition in the age of algorithmic justice.