A Book Review of Sean West’s ‘Unruly: Fighting Back When Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business’, by Bridget McCormack, President, Chief Executive Officer, American Arbitration Association.
To buy toothpaste in New York City, you must ask a store employee to unlock a glass case. As someone who has spent a career focused on building confidence in the rule of law—first as Chief Justice of Michigan’s Supreme Court and now as CEO of the American Arbitration Association—this experience is more disconcerting than Sean West, the author of Unruly, might have intended when sharing the same observation. Shared rules and norms—guardrails that guide behavior through mutual understanding—are being replaced by physical and technological barriers.
West’s Unruly arrives as a warning about this transition. The separate risks posed by politics, technology, and law—the “Unruly Triangle”—are compounded by their intersection. Risk leverages risk and is causing traditional guardrails to fail. AI, for all its benefits, adds to the complexity. Deepfakes and misinformation undermine our shared understanding of truth—the “liar’s dividend.” When video evidence can be dismissed as fake and fake videos can appear authentic, the foundation of the justice system wobbles.
West advises businesses to integrate risk monitoring across disciplines, develop dynamic scenario planning capabilities, invest in technological tools for offense and defense, and build coalitions with adjacent businesses facing similar challenges. He argues that companies must shift from reactive risk management to proactive opportunity-seeking.
Traditional enterprise risk management systems won’t cut it in this new environment. Businesses assess political, legal, and technological risks separately, with different teams managing each in isolation. They conduct annual reviews, plot risks on likelihood-impact matrices, and develop mitigation strategies accordingly. But West shows how today’s most dangerous risks emerge from the intersection of these factors, which are morphing too quickly for conventional monitoring.
West’s documentation of the “rule of law recession,” in which 76% of the global population lives in countries with declining rule of law, is especially unsettling. West focuses on “legal unruling,” when societies have plenty of laws on the books that aren’t enforced, which isn’t just happening in authoritarian regimes but in established democracies as well. And so, we get shampoo in locked pharmacy cases: private actors taking protection into their own hands when they no longer believe the law will function.
West’s focus on the lack of enforcement of laws as evidence of “unruling” is not wrong, but there is more. It is also the case that there are so many laws on the books that most people don’t know about that approximately 70% of Americans have unknowingly committed an offense that could land them in jail if prosecuted. Too much law is also evidence of unruling, a key theme of Justice Gorsuch’s book, Overruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, released this week (a topic for a separate review). As Yale Law Professor William Stuntz said, “Too much law is no law at all.”
Allow me to complicate the problem statement even more: it’s also true that 92% of Americans can’t afford legal help to address their civil justice problems. As a result, most Americans face civil justice problems alone. Nearly 75% of civil cases involve at least one party without a lawyer. And many others give up on their valid claims. This failure undermines confidence in the rule of law as much as any political upheaval or criminal legal enforcement gap.
Yet, while the erosion of legal confidence is a growing crisis, technological advances—particularly AI—may provide an unexpected solution. Amidst West’s warnings, he also captures the hope and possibility AI offers to a broken civil justice market. When he faced an insurance company after a car accident, AI tools helped him understand his rights and navigate his response. When most Americans can’t afford legal advice, AI could dramatically expand access to justice—a problem humans have not been able to solve.
But, even then, West notes that while AI holds the promise of democratizing legal access, it also introduces new risks that could make the system even more adversarial. Technology that might help people assert valid claims could be weaponized by powerful actors to overwhelm opponents with automated litigation. And, sure enough, AI companies focused on personal injury claims like EvenUp, Eve, Supio, and Darrow represent one of the fastest-growing verticals in legal technology.
We are indeed entering an era where legal warfare can be conducted at machine speed and scale. While I agree with West’s characterization of this threat, I have an optimistic outlook on how recent advances in AI can help address rather than compound the problem. The American Arbitration Association was founded on the principle that effective dispute resolution is a cornerstone of a prosperous society. The organization’s founders believed that the goal of every individual arbitration was to restore the parties’ faith in justice. The AAA’s mission was to bring dispute resolution to as many people as possible. They would have seen AI as a massive opportunity to expand dispute resolution to even more parties—to restore their faith in our institutions.
The challenge isn’t to prevent this transformation but to bend it toward justice rather than abuse. Otherwise, we risk a future where legal protection, like toothpaste at Target, is kept behind glass cases—visible to all but accessible only to some.
The rule of law is just a set of ideas that depends on the public’s confidence to hold. Unruly stands apart for its clarity in diagnosing our current institutional breakdown, compelling framework for understanding the intersection of politics, technology, and law, and actionable guidance on surviving and thriving amid volatility. It should be required reading for all leaders, not just those running businesses.
We don’t have to replace guardrails with glass cases. If we embrace innovation to expand access to justice rather than restrict it, we can restore confidence in the rule of law.
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You can purchase the book via US Amazon here and UK Amazon is here.
And you can find out more about the work of the American Arbitration Association here.
Many thanks to Bridget McCormack for this insightful review of the book by Sean West.
[ Note: over the years many people have asked if AL does book reviews – I’ve done a few, but I no longer personally do them due to time constraints. But, if the author can find a notable independent reviewer, plus, naturally, the book is related to AI and the law, then happy to consider them. Please check first before sending anything in. Thanks. Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer. ]