Navigating Artificial Intelligence: Legal Challenges and Innovations Join us in person to explore the latest legal twists and cool innovations in AI tech!

I'll explain why there will be real and durable roles for human lawyers, even in a world of powerful AI.

Join us (and get CLE!) this Friday, April 17: buff.ly/XDADJVf

AI is rapidly improving at all kinds of tasks, including legal research and analysis. Will we still need lawyers? For how long?

Very excited to be giving the keynote address this Friday, April 17 at Nova Law Review's symposium, Navigating Artificial Intelligence: Legal Challenges & Innovations!!

Stanford Law Professors File New Amicus Brief in Support of Trump-Targeted Law Firms | Stanford Law School Stanford Law faculty are again backing the law firms targeted by President Trump’s executive orders. Read the Brief In the latest effort, professors

A story about our DC Circuit brief on behalf of nearly 600 law professors challenging Trump's illegal executive orders against law firms

law.stanford.edu/2026/04/06/s...

it's hard to know what to think in a world where coherent text can be produced in 15 hours.

that you used AI in the production process is one thing.

that you barely cared to check the text it produced is quite another.

but there were expectations about the master's role in the production process. just as we have expectations about what it means to put your name on an article.

i suspect this is the key point.

the master's name meant something. it didn't mean that everything the workshop produced was made by his hand.

the lawyer's deliberate provocation here is frustrating bc i think these are hard & serious q's that merit hard & serious thought

trying to steer the conversation in that direction, but ofc the provocation makes that difficult

yes exactly

in fields where verification can be automated, AI is transformational (caveat: we don't actually know which fields these are!)

in fields where we are far from automated verification, jury is very much still out (caveat: might still be super useful!)

i think brett means the suggestion that anything other than a human being could have 1st amend rights?

altho i suspect op is going to say something wrt readers' rights or AI firms' rights, rather than AI outputs themselves . . .

if you're concerned about AI firms' terms of service, do John Newman & I have a paper for you!

(coming soon to your local SSRN feeds)

the 15 hours made me fall out of my chair

i know i'm not the fastest research producer out there, but that's like barely enough time for me to start thinking about an argument, let alone test/validate/support all the analysis in an article (even a short one)

as you know, i am somewhat obsessed with "production process" so i am not dismissing those issues either!

def a lot of the commentary has the tone of "this is shameful."

the article is bad. but why exactly is the process bad? is it really Claude? or is it 15 hours of review?

but it's less clear that it should matter so much in legal academia. we should care whether "X" is true/correct/insightful/useful. shouldn't matter as much whether "Sarah Fackrell says X" v "Andres Sawicki says X."

or no?

i think what's going on here is that "who said it" matters a lot in our field.

that is in part something we import from the way our legal system works--"SCOTUS says X" has very diff implications than "County Court says X."

yup, this exactly.

we've long been a field that emphasizes solo authorship (we're not alone in that, ofc, but it is a distinctive feature).

i'm not sure whether it's analogous. that's what i'm asking.

i guess what i'm trying to sort through rn is how much of the criticism is (1) you need to tell us that this is diff from our settled expectations re production process v. (2) this is a bad thing that you've done & you should be ashamed.

the ones demanding various types of disclosures/allocation of credit.

i get the intuition that the process by which this article was produced deviates from our norms.

but i am less sure that i know exactly what must come from the "master," as it were. apprentices didn't get credit, right?

so a lawyer "used Claude to assist in drafting" a law review article.

sincere question for critics: what do you make of the renaissance workshop model for producing art?

tbc, i am not judging the quality of this particular article.

but generally: what exactly has to be di sua mano?

I was told it started in November 2022

congrats!!!

Artificial Intelligence and the Law

Can the legal system adapt to generative AI? There are clues in unexpected places!

I'll be revealing those clues, and what they tell us about the future of law & AI, at the Hanley Democracy Center @univmiami.bsky.social Monday at 6:30 PM.

Details: events.miami.edu/event/artifi...

See you there!

LLMs are going to prove that we can quantify legal work.

But Goodhart's law will make us wish we couldn't.

am i right to assume that you're a celtics fan delighted to see kobe's 81 fall down the list?

lololololol

our vice dean just started a monthly essential updates newsletter and it's called "constructive notice" and if you are not a legal academic i can assure you that this is one of the funniest things you can possibly imagine

i realize that i am the target market of "people who lived in nyc during peak lcd soundsystem."

still: i am very much enjoying kiss all the time.

Looks great! Will read with interest.

What’s the article? Send me a draft!

To close, there’s a lot of opportunity to think about how to align private incentive with social welfare when research entails discovery of many dead-ends. All of our proposals have flaws. Details in the paper—get it here!!

buff.ly/XUnO9Eh

3) Also, prizes typically consist of competitors racing to be first to uncover positive info. We can add “red teams” to the competition—these participants would race to be the first to demonstrate that a possible approach won’t work.