Quoting Protagoras by Dan Bieger

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SUMMARY: Entry for June Flash Fiction contest

The justices sat in the court, their clerks dismissed, the staff sent to wait the ringing of the summoning bell. The grave Chief Justice, Robber, leaned back in his chair, hands massaging brow, eyes closed, the question before them playing hide-and-seek with any hooks he tried to apply in his mind's eye. The only certainty he could establish was that Protagoras was a son-of-a-bitch. Without realizing he mumbled aloud, he complained that you'd think that by the 21st century, someone could have developed a reasoned response to the inevitable problem posed by the Roman bastard's seemingly obvious pronouncement.
To his right, an associate justice, Astraia Pureheart, caught the mumble and cackled low. In a whisper, the crone responded to the question she had not been asked: "C'mon, G.R., we got to have something to do to earn our salaries. You can't solve everything with a DeepBlueThroat. Sometimes, you just must have a human mind involved."
A whisper, yes, but she was old and hard of hearing, wasn't wearing her amps, so her whisper carried around the bench and the other seven participants all had something to add. The Chief Justice let them ramble, a disapproving frown directed at the crone, but he retreated back inside his mental fortress. He immediately announced to himself that the damned computer was the problem.
No human judge ever considered issues with the complete objectivity possible to DeepBlueThroat. Humans got an answer and moved on. After ten years of baselining, the court had turned its cases over to the machine and, wham!, in the first week, the 4th case it handled, DeepBlueThroat wound itself up in knots and trotted off to never-never land. And the problem, naturally, fell back on his court.
"Well," he thought to himself, "maybe he was being too hard on the damned machine. After all, it was a human lawyer who had quoted Protagoras to DeepBlueThroat as a summation argument in a case over copyright law, artists-of-all-persuasions versus the internet. That argument had been around for 100 years now. The Chief Justice had counted on DeepBlueThroat to arrive at a thoroughly logical, inarguable decision. But, good old Itzli MacTonaka, the oldest living lawyer in the universe, decided to quote Protagoras and the hope of an inarguable decision went down last's month's black holes. Standing there with those silver mutton chops, the thinning even-more-silver locks on his head, the preposterous wire-framed Ben Franklin spectacles, the old bastard's staccato, stentorian, stiff upper lip delivery stunned, first, the machine, and then this court into apparent absolute ineffectiveness."
"Well, it ain't going to happen that way," the Chief Justice announced to a thoroughly confused bench, his diction reverting to the Appalachia of his youth. "Itzli just ain't gonna get away with it."
And, then in his Chief Justice voice, carefully copied and assimilated from tapes of Everett McKinley Dirksen, he continued to address his fellow judges: "It is very easy to see how the damned machine went astray.