AI and the Rule and Role of Law: Reshaping Legal Regulatory Frameworks to Address Emerging Challenges

The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies-especially Generative AI and autonomous systems-has fundamentally challenged the foundations of legal governance, raising critical questions about the rule of law and the capacity of regulatory frameworks to ensure legal certainty, accountability, and enforceability. While existing legal scholarship has primarily focused on sector-specific AI regulations and compliance mechanisms, it has largely overlooked the broader implications of AI on legal authority, governance structures, and institutional legitimacy. This study addresses this gap by critically examining how AI disrupts traditional legal paradigms, weakens enforcement mechanisms, and reshapes regulatory authority. It argues that AI's autonomy, algorithmic opacity, transnational reach, and unprecedented scale and speed erode state control over rule-making, overwhelm regulatory institutions, and shift governance power to private AI actors-thereby diminishing democratic accountability. Given these transformations, the study advocates for a reconfiguration of legal regulatory frameworks toward adaptive, participatory, and ethically grounded governance models capable of responding to AI's evolving nature. By bridging legal theory and political science perspectives, this study contributes to the growing discourse on AI governance, offering a theoretical and policy-oriented framework for reasserting the role of law in regulating AI-driven, high-impact decision-making.