I have mostly switched to lurking here but some words are so good they must be shared. “Surface the viscerality of parking and of religion”

After reading this, I wanted to know what the numbers would look like with more recent draft law review articles posted to SSRN. So I put a sample of 200 of them through Pangram 4, and found 57 papers with some AI use, 36 of which had >5% of their text from AI: wilftownsend.net/how-many-rec...

How many recently drafted law review articles are written with AI? A quick examination.

AI use in legal scholarship may not be the most important AI topic being discussed these days, but it is having a moment in the corners of the world that care about these things. Julian Nyarko has an ...

wilftownsend.net

Orin Kerr@orinkerr.bsky.social · last mo.

"How Often Are Articles in Top Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?," by Julian Nyarko. The finding, based on Pangram AI detection software: Most 2026 articles in T14 journals have none, but a few have a decent amount, and one is majority AI-written. reason.com/volokh/2026/...

Excited to be back in New Haven for the academic year, visiting at YLS. Let me know if you come to town! So far I've had pizza three times in ten days, it's going to be work to keep that pace up.

Very happy to see this study finally made available publicly. In my many conversations with law professors about AI over the last few months, this study is the one that I have found most consistently helps people update their worldview about AI capabilities.

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Apparently superhuman performance from the AI in answering questions about contract law in this paper, as judged by law professors compared to the answers of their peers -Gemini 2.5 had a 75% win rate vs. professors -Gemini's answers were rated LESS harmful than humans -Newer models do even better

This is tangential, but I wonder how the idea / expression distinction will hold up over time with generated AI. Expressing an idea used to be costly, typically taking effort and often some creativity. What happens when ideas serve as prompts and expression is cheap or free, and easily iterated?

404 Media@404media.co · 6mo ago

Malus, which is a piece of satire but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell software without crediting the original developers.

New post up about what I think is an under-discussed problem: the low visibility that we collectively have into responsible AI use by legal professionals. We have lots of data points about hallucinations, but many fewer public discussions of responsible uses, even though ...

A periodic update about the frequency and intensity of AI use in legal practice: Thomson Reuters reports that 55% of generative AI users at law firms use it at least daily, with 30% multiple times a day:

Happy to see a cameo here from one of my favorite tests in all of the law: whether a procedural rule is really a procedural rule depends on whether it "really regulates procedure."

Maggie Wittlin@maggiewittlin.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Berk v. Choy is here! SCOTUS holds that Fed. R. Civ. P. 8 and Delaware law “give different answers to the question whether Berk’s complaint can be dismissed as insufficient because it was unaccompanied by an affidavit,” and Rule 8 governs in federal court. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Imagine, there are still people who think the United States should switch to the metric system and abandon common sense units of measurement like this

Magnum, T.I.(M.)@hydrationchimp.bsky.social · 9mo ago

not now, 240 toasters-sized asteroid

some good climate/energy news: * 96% of new US power capacity was carbon-free in 2024 (56 gigawatts!) * 2025 included the first month ever when 51% of power on the U.S. grid was carbon-free * The golbal trend is overwhelming: The world is now investing more $ in clean energy than fossil fuels

PM2.5 Kills ~9 Million People Each Year Worldwide@tkovach.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Clean energy is going to win. It's just a question of when.

I have a new post out in @lawfaremedia.org today about continual learning, the goal of many AI developers to build tools that can learn from their users. That technology could have many uses, but also will challenge existing ways we are trying to regulate AI. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when...

When AI Models Can Continually Learn, Will Our Regulations Be Able to Keep Up?

Regulation has already been hard enough for static AI models.

lawfaremedia.org

I have a new post out in @lawfaremedia.org today about continual learning, the goal of many AI developers to build tools that can learn from their users. That technology could have many uses, but also will challenge existing ways we are trying to regulate AI. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when...

When AI Models Can Continually Learn, Will Our Regulations Be Able to Keep Up?

Regulation has already been hard enough for static AI models.

lawfaremedia.org

Regulating static AI models is already difficult and if AI tools will become ones that can learn, regulations will need to adapt quickly. @dannywt.bsky.social explores what new regulatory approaches could look like in a future where change is common and comes fast.

When AI Models Can Continually Learn, Will Our Regulations Be Able to Keep Up?

Regulation has already been hard enough for static AI models.

lawfaremedia.org

A thoughtful thread on the Netflix / Warner Bros merger. I think the points about consumer preferences are particularly important — it’s sometimes hard, but often important, to tease apart when law and policy arguments are inflected by different preferences about product features

An update for Sonnet 4.5, released last week: it scored 60.2% on my final exam (with extended thinking on, 54.4% without it). That's a big step up (~20 percentage points) from Opus 4.1's scores, and puts Sonnet 4.5 close to, if slightly behind, other lead models. On a human curve, that's ~ an A-/B+

Danny Wilf-Townsend@dannywt.bsky.social · last yr.

For my latest round of informal tests of large language models, I looked at how good different models are at taking a law school exam—and also whether they are capable of grading exam answers in a consistent and reasonably accurate way. 🧵 www.wilftownsend.net/p/chatgpt-ta...

One other note: across the five exam answers and dozens of answer evaluations generated here, I did not notice a single hallucination. This test wasn't designed to measure hallucination rates, but it's consistent with the general sense that they have dropped significantly

Danny Wilf-Townsend@dannywt.bsky.social · last yr.

For my latest round of informal tests of large language models, I looked at how good different models are at taking a law school exam—and also whether they are capable of grading exam answers in a consistent and reasonably accurate way. 🧵 www.wilftownsend.net/p/chatgpt-ta...

Our office is again hiring one or more attorneys for a one-year fellowship to work directly with the Illinois Solicitor General and her team, beginning in August/September 2026. www.governmentjobs.com/careers/ilag...

For my latest round of informal tests of large language models, I looked at how good different models are at taking a law school exam—and also whether they are capable of grading exam answers in a consistent and reasonably accurate way. 🧵 www.wilftownsend.net/p/chatgpt-ta...

ChatGPT takes—and grades—my law school exam

The latest round of informal testing of large language models on legal questions

wilftownsend.net

It was very nice to have two of my recent articles featured in JOTWELL reviews this month—Maureen Carroll on "Deterring Unenforceable Terms," courtslaw.jotwell.com/should-draft... and @margotkaminski.bsky.social on "The Deletion Remedy" cyber.jotwell.com/ai-disgorgem...

A nice quick read from my colleague @JonahPerlin about an issue that I see a lot of people oversimplifying: whether an attorney's use of a generative AI tool waives privilege. This is an area where I'm very interested to see how the law develops. news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

No, Generative AI Didn’t Just Kill the Attorney-Client Privilege

Opinion: Georgetown Law professor Jonah Perlin says using third-party technology doesn't categorically waive the attorney-client privilege.

news.bloomberglaw.com

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

A very pleasant surprise to listen to one of my favorite podcasts and hear my own work being discussed. And it's an excellent episode and overview for anyone thinking of AI's effects on the legal profession. Some thoughts / suggestions below for anyone who wants further reading:

Joe Weisenthal@weisenthal.bsky.social · last yr.

NEW ODD LOTS: We talked to the legend @wertwhile.bsky.social about how AI is already reshaping the practice of law. A must listen, with out friend Joel podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

Judge Alsup has the first true opinion on fair use for generative AI in Bartz v. Anthropic. He holds that AI training is fair use, and so is buying books to scan them, but that downloading pirated copies of books for an internal training-data database is not fair use. 🧵

Eriq Gardner@eriqgardner.bsky.social · last yr.

🚨BREAKING: Federal judge concludes that using copyrighted works to train generative A.I. is transformative and ultimately a fair use. (Nevertheless, Anthropic can’t beat the lawsuit because it pirated books for another purpose too.) First of kind ruling. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

I think this is one of the more common mistakes I see with people trying AI—the idea that if you go to a free chatbot, quickly run a question by it, and it does a bad job, then you've learned that AI cannot do a good job on that question.

Danny Wilf-Townsend@dannywt.bsky.social · last yr.

I've had a few recent conversations with judges and law profs who haven't tried generative AI, or have only used it for a few minutes to write a poem or other trivial fun. After a few people asked me about how to start, I thought I'd write up my suggestions: www.wilftownsend.net/p/some-ideas...

Significant ruling in one of the big algorithmic price-fixing lawsuits going on right now: www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

US judge rules health insurers, MultiPlan must face price-fixing lawsuits

A U.S. judge on Tuesday said healthcare providers can pursue claims that technology provider MultiPlan and a group of insurers conspired to underpay them billions of dollars in reimbursements for out-of-network health services.

reuters.com

A good thread on a big new generative AI / IP lawsuit—Disney and Universal vs. Midjourney

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · last yr.

Personally, if I had a machine that egregiously and blatantly violated copyright, I wouldn't have a public "explore page," because the copyright holders might publish 18 pages of examples of me violating their copyright. Suit also includes tons of Reddit guides to doing so too. Oof!

ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.