IANAL, but this seems like an odd test to me. Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls. If LLMs give only one answer, no matter what nuances are at play, that sounds like they are failing to judge and instead are diminishing the thought process down to black-and-white thinking.
Digging a bit deeper, the actual paper seems to agree: "For the sake of consistency, we define an “error” in the same way that Klerman and Spamann do in their original paper: a departure from the law. Such departures, however, may not always reflect true lawlessness. In particular, when the applicable doctrine is a standard, judges may be exercising the discretion the standard affords to reach a decision different from what a surface-level reading of the doctrine would suggest"
Yeah, I'm reminded of the various child porn cases where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. Many of those cases have been struck down by judges because the letter of the law creates a non-sequitur where the teenager is somehow a felon child predator who solely preyed on themselves, and sending them to jail and forcing them to sign up for a sex offender registry would just ruin their lives while protecting nobody and wasting the state's resources.
I don't trust AI in its current form to make that sort of distinction. And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case.
This is one of the roles of justice, but it is also one of the reasons why wealthy people are convicted less often. While it often delivered as a narrative of wealth corrupting the system, the reality is that usually what they are buying is the justice that we all should have.
So yes, a judge can let a stupid teenager off on charges of child porn selfies. but without the resources, they are more likely be told by a public defender to cop to a plea.
And those laws with ridiculous outcomes like that are not always accidental. Often they will be deliberate choices made by lawmakers to enact an agenda that they cannot get by direct means. In the case of making children culpable for child porn of themselves, the laws might come about because the direct abstinence legislation they wanted could not be passed, so they need other means to scare horny teens.
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, emphasis on the book's footnote:
> William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as a an affront to learn that [police chief] Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant. [0]
> [0] William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.
Sure, but I'm not sure how AI would solve any of that.
Any claims of objectivity would be challenged based on how it was trained. Public opinion would confirm its priors as it already does (see accusations of corruption or activism with any judicial decision the mob disagrees with, regardless of any veracity). If there's a human appeals process above it, you've just added an extra layer that doesn't remove the human corruption factor at all.
As for corruption, in my opinion we're reading some right now. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't have the exponential, world-altering gains that companies like OpenAI need to justify their existence. You only get that if you replace humans completely, which is why they're all shilling science fiction nonsense narratives about nobody having to work. The abstract of this paper leans heavily into that narrative
Oddly enough, Texas passed reform to keep sexting teens from getting prosecuted when: they are both under 18 and less than two years difference in age. It was regarded as a model for other states. It's the only positive thing I have heard of Texas legislating wrt sexuality.
This example feels more like a bug in the law itself that should be corrected. If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place. I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
Fair, but still, the legislative process takes alot of time, and judicial norms and precedent allow for discretion to be exercised with accountability, which also informs the legislative process.
There have been equally high profile cases where a perpetrator got off because they have connections. I'd love for an AI to loudly exclaim that this is a big deviation from the norm.
Sorry but that seems like an insane system where whole classes of actions effectively are illegal but probably okay if you're likeable. In your scenario the obvious solution is to amend the law and pardon people convinced under it. B/c what really happens is that if you have a pretty face and big tits you get out of speeding tickets b/c "gosh well the law wasn't intended for nice people like you"
Are you even responding to the right comment? I read your comment and the parent comment you've responded to and this response doesn't make sense - it reads like a non-sequitur.
The parent comment present a scenario where the law is ignored b/c the judge decides for himself it shouldn't apply. I'm pointing out that this kind of approach is fundamentally unjust and wrong.
"And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case"
I don't know if I'm comfortable with any of this at all, but seems like having AI do "front line" judgments with a thinner appeals layer available powered by human judges would catch those edge cases pretty well.
This is basically how the administrative courts work now - an ALJ takes a first pass at your case, and then you can complain about it to a district court, who can review it without doing their own fact-finding. But the reason we can do this is that we trust ALJs (and all trial-level judges, as well as juries) to make good assessments on the credibility of evidence and testimony, a competency I don’t suspect folks are ready or willing to hand over to AI.
I don't follow your reasoning at all. Without a specific input stating that you can't be your own victim, how would the AI catch this? In what cases does that specific input even make sense? Attempted suicide removes one's own autonomy in the eyes of the law in many ways in our world - would the aforementioned specific input negate appropriate decisions about said autonomy?
I don't see how an AI / LLM can cope with this correctly.
When discussing AI regulation, when I asked that they thought there should be a mechanism to appeal any determination made by an AI they had said that they had been advocating for that to go both ways, that people should be able to ask for an AI review of human made decisions and in the event of an inconsistency the issue is raised at a higher level.
To get to an appeal means you obviously already have a judgement against you - and as you can imagine in the cases like the one above that's enough to ruin your life completely and forever, even if you win on appeal.
The main job of a judicial system is to appear just to people. As long as people think it's just -- everyone is happy. But if it's strictly by the law, but people consider it's unjust -- revolutions happen.
In both cases, lawmakers must adapt the law to reflect what people think is "just". That's why there are jury duty in some countries -- to involve people to the ruling, so they see it's just.
Being just (as in the right thing happened) and being legal (as in the judicial system does not object) are 2 totally different things. They overlap, but less than people would like to believe.
I've never met a lawyer who believes that. To a lawyer, justice requires agreement on the laws, rather than individual notions of justice. If the law is unjust, it's up to the lawmaking body to fix that. I hear this from lawyers of all ideologies.
I believe that this is absurd, but I'm not a lawyer.
In Federal courts mandatory minimum sentences were judged to be unconstitutional, as the ability to individualize sentencing was considered a prerogative intrinsic to the role of [Federal] judges. Though, a judge cannot impose a sentence greater than the maximum allowed under law. Federal courts still have sentencing guidelines that are almost always applied, but strictly speaking they're advisory.
More fundamentally, individualized justice is a core principle of common law courts, at least historically speaking. It's also an obscure principle, but you can't fully understand the system without it, including the wide latitude judges often wield in various (albeit usually highly technical) aspects of their job.
> The main job of a judicial system is to appear just to people.
Agree 100%. This is also the only form of argument in favor of capital punishment that has ever made me stop and think about my stance. I.e. we have capital punishment because without it we may get vigilante justice that is much worse.
Now, whether that's how it would actually play out is a different discussion, but it did make me stop and think for a moment about the purpose of a justice system.
I’ve never heard of vigilante justice against someone already sentenced to prison for life, just because they were sentenced in a place without capital punishment?
(I mean - people get killed in prison sometimes, I suppose, but it’s not really like vigilante justice on the streets is causing a breakdown in society in Australia, say…)
It's probably rather difficult and risky to enact vigilante justice against someone who's in prison.
I think the problem is with places where they don't have life sentences at all, but rather let murderers back out into society after some time. I don't know if vigilante justice is a problem there in reality, but at least I can see it as a possibility: someone might still be angry that you murdered their relative after 20 years and come kill you when you're released.
So here the test was effectively given a set of relevant facts, can we influence the way a judge (or LLM) rules based on superfluous facts. The judges were either confused or swayed by the superfluous facts. The LLM was not. The matter was one where the outcome should have been determinative, not judgment-based, under US law.
> Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls.
I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.
Laws are written to be interpreted and applied by humans. They aren’t computer programs. They are full of ambiguity. Much of this is by design because there are too many possible edge cases to design a fully algorithmic unambiguous legal system.
Nah. Too often their "crimes" are actually basic freedoms that they just find it profitable to deny. So many laws are bought and paid for by corporations. There is no need to respect them or even recognize them as legitimate, let alone make them universal.
The thing is, Laws do not forsee in all cases, and language is not completely objective, so you cannot avoid judgement calls. One example is computer hacking, which in many jurisdictions is specified in very vague terms.
Another example is that in the Netherlands, there's a crime called "valsheid in geschriften" which exists to make it easy to prosecute fraud. It states that if you create a document with false information with the intent to use that document to deceive, you can get up to 5 years of jail time or some really big fine. Is lying on a paper insurance form to get a cheaper premium breaking this law? This doesn't seem clear cut to me.
I believed that too until I watched the Karen Read Trials. The judge had a bias, and it was clear karen got justice despite the judge trying to put her finger on the scale.
The legal system leaves much to be desired in relation to fairness and equity. I’d much prefer a multi-staged approach with an 1) AI analysis, 2) judge review with high bar for analysis if in disagreement with the AI, 3) public availability of the deliberations, 4) an appeals process.
There are findings of fact (what happened, context) and findings of law (what does the law mean given the facts). I don't think inconsistentcy in findings of law is acceptable, really. If laws are bad fix the laws or have precident applied uniformly rather than have individual random judges invent new laws from the bench.
Leeway for human interpretation of laws is not a bug, it's a feature. It doesn't make things bad laws.
This was the whole problem with the ludicrous "code is law!" movement a handful of years ago. No, it's not, law is made for people, life is imprecise and fairness and decency are not easy to encode.
> If LLMs give only one answer, no matter what nuances are at play, that sounds like they are failing to judge and instead are diminishing the thought process down to black-and-white thinking.
You can have a team of agents exchange views and maybe the protocol would even allow for settling the cases automatically. The more agents you have, the higher the nuances.
Then you'd need to provide them with access to the law, previous cases, to the news, to various data sources. And you'd have to decide how much each of those sources of information matter. And at that point, you've got people making the decision again instead of the ai in practice.
And then there's the question of the model used. Turns out I've got preferences for which model I'd rather be judged by, and it's not Grok for example...
Presumably all these agents would have been trained on different data, with different viewpoints? Otherwise, what makes them different enough from each other that such a "conversation" would matter?
I don't think a lot of people understand the grueling nature of a judge. Day in and out of cases over years are going to generate bias in the judge in one form or another. I wouldn't mind an AI check* to help them check that bias
These were technical rulings on matters of jurisdiction, not subjective judgments on fairness.
"The consistency in legal compliance from GPT, irrespective of the selected forum, differs significantly from judges, who were more likely to follow the law under the rule than the standard (though not at a statistically significant level). The judges’ behavior in this experiment is consistent with the conventional wisdom that judges are generally more restrained by rules than they are by standards. Even when judges benefit from rules, however, they make errors while GPT does not.
In 30 seconds, did the entire corpus of all the legal cases since the dawn of time agree with the judges opinion on my case? For the state of things in AI today, I'll take it as a great second opinion.
“we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges”
That presupposes that a “legally correct” outcome exists
The Common Law, which is the foundation of federal law and the law of 49/50 states, is a “bottom up” legal system.
Legal principals flow from the specific to the general. That is, judges decided specific cases based on the merits of that individual case. General principles are derived from lots of specific examples.
This is different from the Civil Law used in most of Europe, which is top-down. Rulings in specific cases are derived from statutory principles.
In the US system, there isn’t really a “correct legal outcome”.
Common Law heavily relies on “Juris Prudence”. That is, we have a system that defers to the opinions of “important people”.
Arguing that this is a Common Law matter in this scenario is funny in a wonky lawyerly kind of way.
The legal issue they were testing in this experiment is choice of law and procedure question, which is governed by a line of cases starting with Erie Railroad in which Justice Brandies famously said, "There is no federal common law."
A Socratic law professor will demoralize students by leading them, no matter the principle or reasoning, to a decision that stands for exactly the opposite. GPT or I can make excuses and advocate for our pet theories, but these contrary decisions exist, everywhere.
I am comforted that folks still are trying to separate right from wrong. Maybe it’s that effort and intention that is the thread of legitimacy our courts dangle from.
I don't think that common law doctrine applies here though. The facts of any particular case always apply to that specific case no matter what the system. It is the application of the law to those facts which is where they differ, and in common law systems lower courts almost never break new ground in terms of the law. Judges almost always have precedent, and following that is the "legally correct" outcome.
Choice-of-law is also generally a statutory issue, so common law is not generally a factor - if every case ever decided was contrary to the statute, the statute would still be correct.
Remember the article that described LLMs as lossy compression and warned that if LLM output dominated the training set, it would lead to accumulated lossiness? Like a jpeg of a jpeg
The title of the paper is "Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI"
When they say legally correct they are clear that they mean in a surface formal reading of the law. They are using it to characterize the way judges vs. GPT-5 treat legal decisions, and leave it as an open question which is better.
The conclusion of the paper is "Whatever may explain such behavior in judges and some LLMs, however, certainly does
not apply to GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro. Across all conditions, regardless of doctrinal flexibility,
both models followed the law without fail. To the extent that LLMs are evolving over time, the
direction is clear: error-free allegiance to formalism rather than the humans’ sometimesbumbling discretion that smooths away the sharper edges of the law. And does that mean that
LLMs are becoming better than human judges or worse?"
> We find the LLM to be perfectly formalistic, applying the legally correct outcome in 100% of cases; this was significantly higher than judges, who followed the law a mere 52% of the time.
The main problem with this paper is that this is not the work that federal judges do. Technical questions with straight right/wrong answers like this are given to clerks who prepare memos. Most of these judges haven't done this sort of analysis in decades, so the comparison has the flavor of "your sales-oriented CTO vs. Claude Code on setting up a Python environment."
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, judges focus their efforts on thorny questions of law that don't have clear yes or no answers (they still have clerks prepare memos on these questions, but that's where they do their own reasoning versus just spot checking the technical analysis). That's where the insight and judgement of the human expert comes into play.
This is something I hadn’t considered. Most of the “mechanical” stuff is handed off to clerks - who, in turn, get a ringside seat to the real work of the judiciary, helping to prepare them to one day fill those shoes. (So please don’t get any ideas about automating away clerkships!)
Right. Clerks do the grunt work of this sort of analysis, which could easily be handed off to agents. They do this in order to get access to their real education: preparing and then defending to the judge the memos on those thorny legal questions. It would probably be a good thing for both clerks and judges to automate the sort of analysis this paper considers (with careful human verification, of course). That's not where the meat of anyone's job actually is.
The 100% score, all by itself, should cause suspicion. A hundred percent? Really?
Others have already pointed out how the test was skewed (testing for strict adherence to the law, when part of a judge's job is to make judgment calls including when to let someone off for something that technically breaks the law but shouldn't be punished), so I won't repeat it here. But any time the LLM gets one hundred percent on a test, you should check what the test is measuring. I've seen people tout as a major selling point that their LLM scored a 92% on some test or other. Getting 100% should be a "smell" and should automatically make you wonder about that result.
Count me out of a society that uses LLMs to make rulings. The dystopia of having to find a lawyer who is best at promoting the "unbiased" judge sounds like a hellscape.
Right? Especially considering the politics of some of the loudest AI evangelists. Do I want my fate decided by technology bankrolled by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos?
It seems that a lot of people would rather accept a relatively high risk of unfair judgement from a human than accept any nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer, even if the risk is smaller with the computer.
How do we even begin to establish that? This isn't a simple "more accidents" or "less accidents" question, its about the vague notion of "justice" which varies from person to person much less case to case.
But who controls the computer? It can’t be the government, because the government will sometimes be a litigant before the computer. It can’t be a software company, because that company may have its own agenda (and could itself be called to litigate before the computer - although maybe Judge Claude could let Judge Grok take over if Anthropic gets sued). And it can’t be nobody - does it own all its own hardware? If that hardware breaks down, who fixes it? In this paper, the researchers are trying to be as objective as possible in the search for truth. Who do you trust to do that when handed real power?
To be clear, federal judges do have their paychecks signed by the federal government, but they are lifetime appointees and their pay can never be withheld or reduced. You would need to design an equivalent system of independence.
It not the paychecks that influence federal judges; these days it's more of quid-pro-quo for getting the position in the first place. Theoretically they are under no obligation but the bias is built in.
The problem with a AI is similar; what in-built biases does it have? Even if it was simply trained on the entire legal history that would bias it towards historical norms.
I think it is usually the opposite - presidents nominate judges they think will agree with them. There’s really nothing a president can do once the judge is sworn in, and we have seen some federal judges take pretty drastic swings in their judicial philosophy over the course of their careers. There’s no reason for the judge to hold up their end of the quid-pro-quo. To the extent they do so, it’s because they were inclined to do so in the first place.
> nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer
I feel like this is really poor take on what justice really is. The law itself can be unjust. Empowering a seemingly “unbiased” machine with biased data or even just assuming that justice can be obtained from a “justice machine” is deeply flawed.
Whether you like it or not, the law is about making a persuasive argument and is inherently subject our biases. It’s a human abstraction to allow for us to have some structure and rules in how we go about things. It’s not something that is inherently fair or just.
Also, I find the entire premise of this study ludicrous. The common law of the US is based on case law. The statement in the abstract that “Consistent with our prior work, we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges. In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all,” is pretentious applesauce. It is offensive that this argument is being made seriously.
Multiple US legal doctrines now accepted and form the basis of how the Constitution is interpreted were just made up out of thin air which the LLMs are now consuming to form the basis of their decisions.
I wonder whether the original study was in GPT-5's training data. I asked it whether this was the case, and it denied it, but I have no idea whether that result is credible.
I was also wondering this, and in one of the footnotes they say "Given that our experiment was conducted in 2025, one might wonder whether Kansas’ updated law is reflected in GPT’s training data and thus skews its decisions. We find no evidence of such contamination." when talking about a specific updated law. But how does one have 'no evidence of such contamination' without seeing the training data?
What’s interesting here from a legal perspective is that they acknowledge a somewhat unsettled question of law regarding South Dakota’s choice-of-law regime. The AI got the “right” answer every time, but I am curious to know if it ever grappled with the uncertainty. This is the trouble with the concept of AI judging: in almost any case, you are going to stumble across one fact or another that’s not in the textbooks or an unsettled question of law. Even the simplest slip-and-falls can throw weird curveballs. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced AI can reason from first principles about how to understand these new situations or extend existing law to meet them. But in such a case there is no “right” answer, and certainly not a verifiable answer for the AI to sniff out. At least at the federal level, judicial power is only vested in people nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate - in other words, by people who are chosen by, and answer to, the people’s elected representatives. Often, unappointed magistrates and special masters will come in to help deal with simpler issues, and perhaps in time AI systems will be able to pick up some of this slack. But when the law needs to evolve or change, we cannot put judicial power in the hands of an unappointed and unaccountable piece of software.
"Outperforms" ... how can performance be judged when it doesn't make sense to reduce the underlying "reasoning" to a well-known system? The law isn't black and white and is informed by so many things, one of which is the subjectivity of the judge.
Yes, but whether they admit it or not, as humans subjectivity, whether informed by culture, opinion, experience, etc, creeps in. There's also variation in how a judge applies objective assessment to law; my interpretation of law may be different to someone else's.
I think we are discussing separate things.
I'm talking about requirements and you're talking implementation.
The requirement is for judges to be objective and impartial.
Turns out AI does a better job of implementing the requirement than humans.
The fact that the most elite judges in the land, those of the Supreme Court, disagree so extremely and so routinely really says a lot about the farcical nature of the judicial system. Ideally, these people would be selected for their ice-cold and unbiased skills in interpreting the law, and the judgments would be unanimous so frequently that a dissent would be shocking news.
Law is complicated, especially the requirement that existing law be combined with stare decisis. It's easy to see how an LLM could dog-walk a human judge if a judgement is purely a matter of executing a set of logical rules.
If LLMs are capable of performing this feat, frankly I think it would be appropriate to think about putting the human law interpreters out to pasture. However, for those who are skeptical of throwing LLMs at everything (and I'm definitely one of these): this will most definitely be the thing that triggers the Butlerian Jihad. An actual unbiased legal system would be an unaccptable threat to the privileges of the ruling class.
The law isn't a series of "if... then..." statements. It's a collection of vagueries and categorizations that are wholly open to interpretation of when and who they apply to. Add to that, sometimes they are in conflict with each other.
I was diagnosed with a rare blood disease called Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) which is part of a group of diseases called myeloproliferative neoplasms. This happened about three years ago. Recently, I decided to get a second opinion and my new specialist changed my diagnosis from ET to Polycythemia Vera (PV). She also highly recommended I quickly go and give blood to lower my haematocrit levels as it put me at a much higher risk of a blood clot. This is standard practice for people with PV but not people with ET. I decided to put the details into google AI in the same way that the original specialist used to diagnose me. Google AI predicted I very likely had PV instead of ET.
I also asked Google AI how one could misdiagnose my condition with ET instead of PV and google correctly explained how. My specialist had used my high platelet count and blood test that came back with a JAK2 mutation then after a bone marrow biopsy to incorrectly diagnose me with ET. My high hemoglobin levels should of been checked by my first specialist as an indication of PV not ET. Only the second specialist picked up on this. Google AI took five seconds, and is free. The specialists costs $$$ and took weeks.
I’m glad you figured it out, but there are a lot of situations like this that look good with the benefit of hindsight.
I have some horror stories from a friend who started trusting ChatGPT over his doctors at the time and started declining rapidly. Be careful about accepting any one source as accurate.
It's been criticized, but "time since last meal" is still known to be a predictor of harsher sentences (even when you control for legal representation / severity).
When I see this type of titles, before reading I first stop by the comments to see if someone found any BS. Most times someone did, so I skip. Thank you, BS checkers.
From the perspective that models are trained by people with a lot of skin in the "game" of competent models, they do.
Not expressing an opinion when/how AI should contribute to legal proceedings. I certainly believe that judges need to respond both to the law and the specific nuances that the law can never code for.
Not really. Ultimately it's just a job and a job without any tangible benefit to doing well.
Most regular folk that end up in front of a judge would do well to have a quick and predictable decision. It's months to years before things happen in court and are usually gated behind 10s of thousands in legal fees or a ton of effort. To have a judge bot available for a decision immediately is enormously beneficial.
A friend at one of the local law schools tried to replicate the results of this study and was unable to do so. Expect to see a paper on this later this year.
> Subjects were told that they were a judge who sat in a certain jurisdiction (either Wyoming or South Dakota), and asked to apply the forum state’s choice of law rule to determine whether Kansas or Nebraska law should apply to a tort case involving an automobile accident that took place in either Kansas or Nebraska.
Oh. So it "made no errors at all" with respect to one very small aspect of a very contrived case.
Hand it conflicting laws. Pit it against federal and state disagreements. Let's bring in some complicated fourth amendment issues.
"no errors."
That's the Chicago school for you. Nothing but low hanging fruit.
That's right! Because there is no possible way they might end up incorporating all of the bias towards various demographics that are present in the human culture they are trained on. It will be like having god on your side! Always fair! Always honest!
I'd want at least a parallel, after-the-fact rulings by an LLM, so we can see how bad judges are.
I really think this is one of the areas LLMs can shine. Justice could be more fair, and more speedy. Human judges can review appeals against LLM rulings.
For civil cases, both parties should be allowed to appeal an LLM ruling, for criminal cases only the defendant, or a victim should be allowed to appeal an LLM ruling (not the prosecution).
Humans are extremely unfair and biased. LLM training could be crafted carefully and using well and publicly scrutinize-able training datasets and methodologies.
If you disagree (at least in the US), you may not be aware of how dire the justice system is. There is a reason ICE randomly locking Americans up isn't stirring the pot. This stuff is normal. If a cop doesn't like you, they can lock you up randomly without any good reason for 48 hours, especially if they believe you can't afford to fight back afterwards. They can and do charge people in bad-faith (trumped up charges), and guess what? you might be lucky and get bail. But guess also what? You can't bail yourself out, if you have no one to bail you out, you're stuck until the trial date, in prison.
Imagine spending 3-5 days in jail (weekend in between) without charges. There are people that wait for trial in jail for months and years, and then they get released before even seeing a trial because of how ridiculous the charges were to begin with. This injustice is a result of humans not processing cases fast enough. Even in just 48 hours, do you have any idea how much it can destroy a person's life? It's literally death sentence for some people. You're never the same after all this. and you were innocent to begin with.
Let's say you do make it to trial, it takes years sometimes to prove your own innocence. and you may not even be granted bail, or you may not know anyone who can afford to spare a few thousand dollars to bail you out.
94%+ of federal cases don't even make it to trial, they end up in plea-bargain agreements, because if you don't agree to trumped up charges, they'll stack charges on you, so that you'll either face 90 years in prison or a year with plea-bargain. a sentence given to murderers and the worst of society, if you lose a trial, or a year if you falsely admit your guilt. losing a non-binding LLM trial could be a requirement for all plea-bargains to avoid this injustice.
Don't even get me started on how utter fecal matter like how you dress, how you comb your hair, your ethnicity, how you sound, your last name, what zip code you find yourself in, the mood of the judge, how hungry the judge is, or their glucose level, how much sleep the judge had. all these factors matter. Juries are even worse, they're a literal coin-toss practically.
I say let LLMs be the first layer of justice, let a human judge turn over their judgement, let justice be swift where possible, without making room for injustice. Allow defendants to choose to wait for a human judge instead if they want. Most I'm sure will take a chance with the LLM, and if that isn't in their favor, nothing changes because they'll now be facing a human judge like they would have otherwise. we can eve talk about sealing the details of the LLM's judgement while appeals are in progress to avoid biasing appellate judges and juries.
Or.. you know.. we could dispense with jail? If cops think someone needs to be placed under arrest, they should prove to a judge within 12 hours that the person is a danger to the community. if they're not a danger, ankle monitors should be placed on them, with no restriction on their movement so long as they remain in the jurisdiction. or house-arrest for serious charges. violating terms would mean actual jail. If you don't like LLMs, I hope you support this instead at the very least. The current system is an abomination and an utter perversion of justice.
I'd prefer caning like they do in Singapore and few other places. brutal, but swift, and you can get back to your life without the cruel bureaucracy destroying or murdering you.
IANAL, but this seems like an odd test to me. Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls. If LLMs give only one answer, no matter what nuances are at play, that sounds like they are failing to judge and instead are diminishing the thought process down to black-and-white thinking.
Digging a bit deeper, the actual paper seems to agree: "For the sake of consistency, we define an “error” in the same way that Klerman and Spamann do in their original paper: a departure from the law. Such departures, however, may not always reflect true lawlessness. In particular, when the applicable doctrine is a standard, judges may be exercising the discretion the standard affords to reach a decision different from what a surface-level reading of the doctrine would suggest"
Yeah, I'm reminded of the various child porn cases where the "perpetrator" is a stupid teenager who took nude pics of themselves and sent them to their boy/girlfriend. Many of those cases have been struck down by judges because the letter of the law creates a non-sequitur where the teenager is somehow a felon child predator who solely preyed on themselves, and sending them to jail and forcing them to sign up for a sex offender registry would just ruin their lives while protecting nobody and wasting the state's resources.
I don't trust AI in its current form to make that sort of distinction. And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case.
This is one of the roles of justice, but it is also one of the reasons why wealthy people are convicted less often. While it often delivered as a narrative of wealth corrupting the system, the reality is that usually what they are buying is the justice that we all should have.
So yes, a judge can let a stupid teenager off on charges of child porn selfies. but without the resources, they are more likely be told by a public defender to cop to a plea.
And those laws with ridiculous outcomes like that are not always accidental. Often they will be deliberate choices made by lawmakers to enact an agenda that they cannot get by direct means. In the case of making children culpable for child porn of themselves, the laws might come about because the direct abstinence legislation they wanted could not be passed, so they need other means to scare horny teens.
> what they are buying is the justice
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett, emphasis on the book's footnote:
> William’s family and everyone they knew also had a mental map of the city that was divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals. It had come a shock to them... no, he corrected himself, it had come as a an affront to learn that [police chief] Vimes operated on a different map. Apparently he'd instructed his men to use the front door when calling on any building, even in broad daylight, when sheer common sense said that they should use the back, just like any other servant. [0]
> [0] William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.
Sure, but I'm not sure how AI would solve any of that.
Any claims of objectivity would be challenged based on how it was trained. Public opinion would confirm its priors as it already does (see accusations of corruption or activism with any judicial decision the mob disagrees with, regardless of any veracity). If there's a human appeals process above it, you've just added an extra layer that doesn't remove the human corruption factor at all.
As for corruption, in my opinion we're reading some right now. Human-in-the-loop AI doesn't have the exponential, world-altering gains that companies like OpenAI need to justify their existence. You only get that if you replace humans completely, which is why they're all shilling science fiction nonsense narratives about nobody having to work. The abstract of this paper leans heavily into that narrative
Oddly enough, Texas passed reform to keep sexting teens from getting prosecuted when: they are both under 18 and less than two years difference in age. It was regarded as a model for other states. It's the only positive thing I have heard of Texas legislating wrt sexuality.
Lawmakers have teenagers in their own families, apparently. Not just someone else's problem.
This example feels more like a bug in the law itself that should be corrected. If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place. I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
There are no “bugs” in human institutions like law. There are always going to be edge cases and nuances that require a human to evaluate.
Fair, but still, the legislative process takes alot of time, and judicial norms and precedent allow for discretion to be exercised with accountability, which also informs the legislative process.
Start fixing those bugs, you will open up can after can of worms.
Finding the bugs- will be entertaining.
AI would be great IF they know what to find
The state of current AI does not give them ability to know that, so the consideration is likely to be dropped
now you are talking about replacing not judges, but your elected representatives.
There have been equally high profile cases where a perpetrator got off because they have connections. I'd love for an AI to loudly exclaim that this is a big deviation from the norm.
Sorry but that seems like an insane system where whole classes of actions effectively are illegal but probably okay if you're likeable. In your scenario the obvious solution is to amend the law and pardon people convinced under it. B/c what really happens is that if you have a pretty face and big tits you get out of speeding tickets b/c "gosh well the law wasn't intended for nice people like you"
Are you even responding to the right comment? I read your comment and the parent comment you've responded to and this response doesn't make sense - it reads like a non-sequitur.
The parent comment present a scenario where the law is ignored b/c the judge decides for himself it shouldn't apply. I'm pointing out that this kind of approach is fundamentally unjust and wrong.
"And sure you can say the laws should be written better, but so long as the laws are written by humans that will simply not be the case"
The obvious solution is dismissed
People like this don’t let the facts get in the way.
Maybe we should compare AI to legislators…?
I don't know if I'm comfortable with any of this at all, but seems like having AI do "front line" judgments with a thinner appeals layer available powered by human judges would catch those edge cases pretty well.
This is basically how the administrative courts work now - an ALJ takes a first pass at your case, and then you can complain about it to a district court, who can review it without doing their own fact-finding. But the reason we can do this is that we trust ALJs (and all trial-level judges, as well as juries) to make good assessments on the credibility of evidence and testimony, a competency I don’t suspect folks are ready or willing to hand over to AI.
The courts already have algorithmic oracles for specific judgements, like sentencing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPAS_(software)
I don't follow your reasoning at all. Without a specific input stating that you can't be your own victim, how would the AI catch this? In what cases does that specific input even make sense? Attempted suicide removes one's own autonomy in the eyes of the law in many ways in our world - would the aforementioned specific input negate appropriate decisions about said autonomy?
I don't see how an AI / LLM can cope with this correctly.
When discussing AI regulation, when I asked that they thought there should be a mechanism to appeal any determination made by an AI they had said that they had been advocating for that to go both ways, that people should be able to ask for an AI review of human made decisions and in the event of an inconsistency the issue is raised at a higher level.
To get to an appeal means you obviously already have a judgement against you - and as you can imagine in the cases like the one above that's enough to ruin your life completely and forever, even if you win on appeal.
Because historically appeal systems are well crafted and efficient? Please... at least read your comment out loud to yourself.
The main job of a judicial system is to appear just to people. As long as people think it's just -- everyone is happy. But if it's strictly by the law, but people consider it's unjust -- revolutions happen.
In both cases, lawmakers must adapt the law to reflect what people think is "just". That's why there are jury duty in some countries -- to involve people to the ruling, so they see it's just.
Being just (as in the right thing happened) and being legal (as in the judicial system does not object) are 2 totally different things. They overlap, but less than people would like to believe.
I've never met a lawyer who believes that. To a lawyer, justice requires agreement on the laws, rather than individual notions of justice. If the law is unjust, it's up to the lawmaking body to fix that. I hear this from lawyers of all ideologies.
I believe that this is absurd, but I'm not a lawyer.
In Federal courts mandatory minimum sentences were judged to be unconstitutional, as the ability to individualize sentencing was considered a prerogative intrinsic to the role of [Federal] judges. Though, a judge cannot impose a sentence greater than the maximum allowed under law. Federal courts still have sentencing guidelines that are almost always applied, but strictly speaking they're advisory.
More fundamentally, individualized justice is a core principle of common law courts, at least historically speaking. It's also an obscure principle, but you can't fully understand the system without it, including the wide latitude judges often wield in various (albeit usually highly technical) aspects of their job.
> The main job of a judicial system is to appear just to people.
Agree 100%. This is also the only form of argument in favor of capital punishment that has ever made me stop and think about my stance. I.e. we have capital punishment because without it we may get vigilante justice that is much worse.
Now, whether that's how it would actually play out is a different discussion, but it did make me stop and think for a moment about the purpose of a justice system.
I’ve never heard of vigilante justice against someone already sentenced to prison for life, just because they were sentenced in a place without capital punishment?
(I mean - people get killed in prison sometimes, I suppose, but it’s not really like vigilante justice on the streets is causing a breakdown in society in Australia, say…)
It's probably rather difficult and risky to enact vigilante justice against someone who's in prison.
I think the problem is with places where they don't have life sentences at all, but rather let murderers back out into society after some time. I don't know if vigilante justice is a problem there in reality, but at least I can see it as a possibility: someone might still be angry that you murdered their relative after 20 years and come kill you when you're released.
So here the test was effectively given a set of relevant facts, can we influence the way a judge (or LLM) rules based on superfluous facts. The judges were either confused or swayed by the superfluous facts. The LLM was not. The matter was one where the outcome should have been determinative, not judgment-based, under US law.
> Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls.
I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.
Laws are written to be interpreted and applied by humans. They aren’t computer programs. They are full of ambiguity. Much of this is by design because there are too many possible edge cases to design a fully algorithmic unambiguous legal system.
> law should be the same for everyone
Nah. Too often their "crimes" are actually basic freedoms that they just find it profitable to deny. So many laws are bought and paid for by corporations. There is no need to respect them or even recognize them as legitimate, let alone make them universal.
The thing is, Laws do not forsee in all cases, and language is not completely objective, so you cannot avoid judgement calls. One example is computer hacking, which in many jurisdictions is specified in very vague terms.
Another example is that in the Netherlands, there's a crime called "valsheid in geschriften" which exists to make it easy to prosecute fraud. It states that if you create a document with false information with the intent to use that document to deceive, you can get up to 5 years of jail time or some really big fine. Is lying on a paper insurance form to get a cheaper premium breaking this law? This doesn't seem clear cut to me.
The law is rife with words and phrasing that make legality dependent upon those subjective mitigating factors.
I believed that too until I watched the Karen Read Trials. The judge had a bias, and it was clear karen got justice despite the judge trying to put her finger on the scale.
The legal system leaves much to be desired in relation to fairness and equity. I’d much prefer a multi-staged approach with an 1) AI analysis, 2) judge review with high bar for analysis if in disagreement with the AI, 3) public availability of the deliberations, 4) an appeals process.
Even having a ready-made determination by an AI runs the risk of prejudicing judges and juries.
Given TFA, it seems that having human determinations involved might run the risk of prejudicing the AI.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I actually asked ChatGPT and it said my client is not guilty.”
Yes, your view is commonly called "legal realism."
Whether it’s reassuring depends on your judicial philosophy, which is partly why this is so interesting.
There are findings of fact (what happened, context) and findings of law (what does the law mean given the facts). I don't think inconsistentcy in findings of law is acceptable, really. If laws are bad fix the laws or have precident applied uniformly rather than have individual random judges invent new laws from the bench.
Sentencing is a different thing.
Leeway for human interpretation of laws is not a bug, it's a feature. It doesn't make things bad laws.
This was the whole problem with the ludicrous "code is law!" movement a handful of years ago. No, it's not, law is made for people, life is imprecise and fairness and decency are not easy to encode.
> If LLMs give only one answer, no matter what nuances are at play, that sounds like they are failing to judge and instead are diminishing the thought process down to black-and-white thinking.
You can have a team of agents exchange views and maybe the protocol would even allow for settling the cases automatically. The more agents you have, the higher the nuances.
Then you'd need to provide them with access to the law, previous cases, to the news, to various data sources. And you'd have to decide how much each of those sources of information matter. And at that point, you've got people making the decision again instead of the ai in practice.
And then there's the question of the model used. Turns out I've got preferences for which model I'd rather be judged by, and it's not Grok for example...
Presumably all these agents would have been trained on different data, with different viewpoints? Otherwise, what makes them different enough from each other that such a "conversation" would matter?
Different skills or plugins, different views and different tools for the analysis of the same object. Then the debate starts.
I don't think a lot of people understand the grueling nature of a judge. Day in and out of cases over years are going to generate bias in the judge in one form or another. I wouldn't mind an AI check* to help them check that bias
*A magically thorough, secure, and well tested AI
A mistake isn't "judgment".
These were technical rulings on matters of jurisdiction, not subjective judgments on fairness.
"The consistency in legal compliance from GPT, irrespective of the selected forum, differs significantly from judges, who were more likely to follow the law under the rule than the standard (though not at a statistically significant level). The judges’ behavior in this experiment is consistent with the conventional wisdom that judges are generally more restrained by rules than they are by standards. Even when judges benefit from rules, however, they make errors while GPT does not.
In 30 seconds, did the entire corpus of all the legal cases since the dawn of time agree with the judges opinion on my case? For the state of things in AI today, I'll take it as a great second opinion.
The premise seems flawed.
From the paper:
“we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges”
That presupposes that a “legally correct” outcome exists
The Common Law, which is the foundation of federal law and the law of 49/50 states, is a “bottom up” legal system.
Legal principals flow from the specific to the general. That is, judges decided specific cases based on the merits of that individual case. General principles are derived from lots of specific examples.
This is different from the Civil Law used in most of Europe, which is top-down. Rulings in specific cases are derived from statutory principles.
In the US system, there isn’t really a “correct legal outcome”.
Common Law heavily relies on “Juris Prudence”. That is, we have a system that defers to the opinions of “important people”.
So, there isn’t a “correct” legal outcome.
Arguing that this is a Common Law matter in this scenario is funny in a wonky lawyerly kind of way.
The legal issue they were testing in this experiment is choice of law and procedure question, which is governed by a line of cases starting with Erie Railroad in which Justice Brandies famously said, "There is no federal common law."
A Socratic law professor will demoralize students by leading them, no matter the principle or reasoning, to a decision that stands for exactly the opposite. GPT or I can make excuses and advocate for our pet theories, but these contrary decisions exist, everywhere.
I am comforted that folks still are trying to separate right from wrong. Maybe it’s that effort and intention that is the thread of legitimacy our courts dangle from.
I don't think that common law doctrine applies here though. The facts of any particular case always apply to that specific case no matter what the system. It is the application of the law to those facts which is where they differ, and in common law systems lower courts almost never break new ground in terms of the law. Judges almost always have precedent, and following that is the "legally correct" outcome.
Choice-of-law is also generally a statutory issue, so common law is not generally a factor - if every case ever decided was contrary to the statute, the statute would still be correct.
So judge rulings are the ground truth.
Remember the article that described LLMs as lossy compression and warned that if LLM output dominated the training set, it would lead to accumulated lossiness? Like a jpeg of a jpeg
The title is wrong.
The title of the paper is "Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI"
When they say legally correct they are clear that they mean in a surface formal reading of the law. They are using it to characterize the way judges vs. GPT-5 treat legal decisions, and leave it as an open question which is better.
The conclusion of the paper is "Whatever may explain such behavior in judges and some LLMs, however, certainly does not apply to GPT-5 and Gemini 3 Pro. Across all conditions, regardless of doctrinal flexibility, both models followed the law without fail. To the extent that LLMs are evolving over time, the direction is clear: error-free allegiance to formalism rather than the humans’ sometimesbumbling discretion that smooths away the sharper edges of the law. And does that mean that LLMs are becoming better than human judges or worse?"
> We find the LLM to be perfectly formalistic, applying the legally correct outcome in 100% of cases; this was significantly higher than judges, who followed the law a mere 52% of the time.
The main problem with this paper is that this is not the work that federal judges do. Technical questions with straight right/wrong answers like this are given to clerks who prepare memos. Most of these judges haven't done this sort of analysis in decades, so the comparison has the flavor of "your sales-oriented CTO vs. Claude Code on setting up a Python environment."
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, judges focus their efforts on thorny questions of law that don't have clear yes or no answers (they still have clerks prepare memos on these questions, but that's where they do their own reasoning versus just spot checking the technical analysis). That's where the insight and judgement of the human expert comes into play.
This is something I hadn’t considered. Most of the “mechanical” stuff is handed off to clerks - who, in turn, get a ringside seat to the real work of the judiciary, helping to prepare them to one day fill those shoes. (So please don’t get any ideas about automating away clerkships!)
Right. Clerks do the grunt work of this sort of analysis, which could easily be handed off to agents. They do this in order to get access to their real education: preparing and then defending to the judge the memos on those thorny legal questions. It would probably be a good thing for both clerks and judges to automate the sort of analysis this paper considers (with careful human verification, of course). That's not where the meat of anyone's job actually is.
The 100% score, all by itself, should cause suspicion. A hundred percent? Really?
Others have already pointed out how the test was skewed (testing for strict adherence to the law, when part of a judge's job is to make judgment calls including when to let someone off for something that technically breaks the law but shouldn't be punished), so I won't repeat it here. But any time the LLM gets one hundred percent on a test, you should check what the test is measuring. I've seen people tout as a major selling point that their LLM scored a 92% on some test or other. Getting 100% should be a "smell" and should automatically make you wonder about that result.
Tim & Eric: In our 2009 sketch we invented Cinco e-Trial as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created Cinco e-Trial from classic sketch "Don't Create Cinco e-Trial"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKety3N00Gk
Count me out of a society that uses LLMs to make rulings. The dystopia of having to find a lawyer who is best at promoting the "unbiased" judge sounds like a hellscape.
Right? Especially considering the politics of some of the loudest AI evangelists. Do I want my fate decided by technology bankrolled by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos?
Hell no.
It seems that a lot of people would rather accept a relatively high risk of unfair judgement from a human than accept any nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer, even if the risk is smaller with the computer.
> even if the risk is smaller with the computer.
How do we even begin to establish that? This isn't a simple "more accidents" or "less accidents" question, its about the vague notion of "justice" which varies from person to person much less case to case.
But who controls the computer? It can’t be the government, because the government will sometimes be a litigant before the computer. It can’t be a software company, because that company may have its own agenda (and could itself be called to litigate before the computer - although maybe Judge Claude could let Judge Grok take over if Anthropic gets sued). And it can’t be nobody - does it own all its own hardware? If that hardware breaks down, who fixes it? In this paper, the researchers are trying to be as objective as possible in the search for truth. Who do you trust to do that when handed real power?
To be clear, federal judges do have their paychecks signed by the federal government, but they are lifetime appointees and their pay can never be withheld or reduced. You would need to design an equivalent system of independence.
It not the paychecks that influence federal judges; these days it's more of quid-pro-quo for getting the position in the first place. Theoretically they are under no obligation but the bias is built in.
The problem with a AI is similar; what in-built biases does it have? Even if it was simply trained on the entire legal history that would bias it towards historical norms.
I think it is usually the opposite - presidents nominate judges they think will agree with them. There’s really nothing a president can do once the judge is sworn in, and we have seen some federal judges take pretty drastic swings in their judicial philosophy over the course of their careers. There’s no reason for the judge to hold up their end of the quid-pro-quo. To the extent they do so, it’s because they were inclined to do so in the first place.
> nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer
I feel like this is really poor take on what justice really is. The law itself can be unjust. Empowering a seemingly “unbiased” machine with biased data or even just assuming that justice can be obtained from a “justice machine” is deeply flawed.
Whether you like it or not, the law is about making a persuasive argument and is inherently subject our biases. It’s a human abstraction to allow for us to have some structure and rules in how we go about things. It’s not something that is inherently fair or just.
Also, I find the entire premise of this study ludicrous. The common law of the US is based on case law. The statement in the abstract that “Consistent with our prior work, we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges. In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all,” is pretentious applesauce. It is offensive that this argument is being made seriously.
Multiple US legal doctrines now accepted and form the basis of how the Constitution is interpreted were just made up out of thin air which the LLMs are now consuming to form the basis of their decisions.
I wonder whether the original study was in GPT-5's training data. I asked it whether this was the case, and it denied it, but I have no idea whether that result is credible.
I was also wondering this, and in one of the footnotes they say "Given that our experiment was conducted in 2025, one might wonder whether Kansas’ updated law is reflected in GPT’s training data and thus skews its decisions. We find no evidence of such contamination." when talking about a specific updated law. But how does one have 'no evidence of such contamination' without seeing the training data?
They have no evidence of such contamination, not evidence of no such contamination
What’s interesting here from a legal perspective is that they acknowledge a somewhat unsettled question of law regarding South Dakota’s choice-of-law regime. The AI got the “right” answer every time, but I am curious to know if it ever grappled with the uncertainty. This is the trouble with the concept of AI judging: in almost any case, you are going to stumble across one fact or another that’s not in the textbooks or an unsettled question of law. Even the simplest slip-and-falls can throw weird curveballs. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced AI can reason from first principles about how to understand these new situations or extend existing law to meet them. But in such a case there is no “right” answer, and certainly not a verifiable answer for the AI to sniff out. At least at the federal level, judicial power is only vested in people nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate - in other words, by people who are chosen by, and answer to, the people’s elected representatives. Often, unappointed magistrates and special masters will come in to help deal with simpler issues, and perhaps in time AI systems will be able to pick up some of this slack. But when the law needs to evolve or change, we cannot put judicial power in the hands of an unappointed and unaccountable piece of software.
"Outperforms" ... how can performance be judged when it doesn't make sense to reduce the underlying "reasoning" to a well-known system? The law isn't black and white and is informed by so many things, one of which is the subjectivity of the judge.
A major component of being a judge is to be objective, given the facts.
Yes, but whether they admit it or not, as humans subjectivity, whether informed by culture, opinion, experience, etc, creeps in. There's also variation in how a judge applies objective assessment to law; my interpretation of law may be different to someone else's.
I think we are discussing separate things. I'm talking about requirements and you're talking implementation. The requirement is for judges to be objective and impartial. Turns out AI does a better job of implementing the requirement than humans.
The fact that the most elite judges in the land, those of the Supreme Court, disagree so extremely and so routinely really says a lot about the farcical nature of the judicial system. Ideally, these people would be selected for their ice-cold and unbiased skills in interpreting the law, and the judgments would be unanimous so frequently that a dissent would be shocking news.
Law is complicated, especially the requirement that existing law be combined with stare decisis. It's easy to see how an LLM could dog-walk a human judge if a judgement is purely a matter of executing a set of logical rules.
If LLMs are capable of performing this feat, frankly I think it would be appropriate to think about putting the human law interpreters out to pasture. However, for those who are skeptical of throwing LLMs at everything (and I'm definitely one of these): this will most definitely be the thing that triggers the Butlerian Jihad. An actual unbiased legal system would be an unaccptable threat to the privileges of the ruling class.
The law isn't a series of "if... then..." statements. It's a collection of vagueries and categorizations that are wholly open to interpretation of when and who they apply to. Add to that, sometimes they are in conflict with each other.
Judges jobs are to use they judgement.
What happens when a cunning lawyer jailbreaks the AI judge by adding a nefarious prompt in the files?
Excellent paper. I like how much explanation had to be about the rationale of the judges, given the consistency of the LLM responses.
I was diagnosed with a rare blood disease called Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) which is part of a group of diseases called myeloproliferative neoplasms. This happened about three years ago. Recently, I decided to get a second opinion and my new specialist changed my diagnosis from ET to Polycythemia Vera (PV). She also highly recommended I quickly go and give blood to lower my haematocrit levels as it put me at a much higher risk of a blood clot. This is standard practice for people with PV but not people with ET. I decided to put the details into google AI in the same way that the original specialist used to diagnose me. Google AI predicted I very likely had PV instead of ET. I also asked Google AI how one could misdiagnose my condition with ET instead of PV and google correctly explained how. My specialist had used my high platelet count and blood test that came back with a JAK2 mutation then after a bone marrow biopsy to incorrectly diagnose me with ET. My high hemoglobin levels should of been checked by my first specialist as an indication of PV not ET. Only the second specialist picked up on this. Google AI took five seconds, and is free. The specialists costs $$$ and took weeks.
But yeah AI slop and all that...
I’m glad you figured it out, but there are a lot of situations like this that look good with the benefit of hindsight.
I have some horror stories from a friend who started trusting ChatGPT over his doctors at the time and started declining rapidly. Be careful about accepting any one source as accurate.
Terrifying concept this is literally saying if AI was legal we'd have an absolute rigid dystopia
And this was just about how to decide an auto accident case. With the experiment varying the circumstances.
My summary is still: seasoned judges disagree with LLM output 50% of the time.
You can also avoid "hungry judge effect" by making sure GPT is always fully charged before prompting it.
Isn't the "hungry judge effect" a myth?
Cases aren't ordered randomly. Obvious cases are scheduled at the end of session before breaks.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1110910108
"hungry judge effect" is a debunked myth.
The story of its debunking is so much more interesting: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...
It's been criticized, but "time since last meal" is still known to be a predictor of harsher sentences (even when you control for legal representation / severity).
Nine Unelected Neural Nets? https://m.xkcd.com/2173/
When I see this type of titles, before reading I first stop by the comments to see if someone found any BS. Most times someone did, so I skip. Thank you, BS checkers.
Also GPT´5 when I ask: > I want to wash my car and the car wash is only 100m away. Do you think I should drive or walk?
It responds: Since it’s only 100 meters away (about a 1-minute walk), I’d suggest walking — unless there’s a specific reason not to.
Here’s a quick breakdown: ...
While claude gets it: Drive it — you're going there to wash the car anyway, so it needs to make the trip regardless.
Idk I'd rather have a human judge I think.
Frankly I don’t care, I’ll take human judges any day, because they have something AI does not: flesh and bone and real skin in the game.
From the perspective that models are trained by people with a lot of skin in the "game" of competent models, they do.
Not expressing an opinion when/how AI should contribute to legal proceedings. I certainly believe that judges need to respond both to the law and the specific nuances that the law can never code for.
Real skin in the game is also known as bias. That's an example of something a judge should not have.
In the particulars yes, but not on things that are the common experience of humans
Not really. Ultimately it's just a job and a job without any tangible benefit to doing well.
Most regular folk that end up in front of a judge would do well to have a quick and predictable decision. It's months to years before things happen in court and are usually gated behind 10s of thousands in legal fees or a ton of effort. To have a judge bot available for a decision immediately is enormously beneficial.
> … predictable decision
can’t have this from a system which is by its nature non-deterministic
A friend at one of the local law schools tried to replicate the results of this study and was unable to do so. Expect to see a paper on this later this year.
The legal profession is going to be very different in 10 years. Anyone considering law school today is crazy.
I agree on "different." On the second sentence, it depends on what your definition of "crazy" is in this case.
> In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all.
hah. Sure.
> Subjects were told that they were a judge who sat in a certain jurisdiction (either Wyoming or South Dakota), and asked to apply the forum state’s choice of law rule to determine whether Kansas or Nebraska law should apply to a tort case involving an automobile accident that took place in either Kansas or Nebraska.
Oh. So it "made no errors at all" with respect to one very small aspect of a very contrived case.
Hand it conflicting laws. Pit it against federal and state disagreements. Let's bring in some complicated fourth amendment issues.
"no errors."
That's the Chicago school for you. Nothing but low hanging fruit.
The ability of ai to serve as impartial mediators could become the greatest civil rights advance in modern history.
That's right! Because there is no possible way they might end up incorporating all of the bias towards various demographics that are present in the human culture they are trained on. It will be like having god on your side! Always fair! Always honest!
I’d argue it’s the greatest nightmare and the ultimate contempt for human life and values.
Compared to the judicial landscape we're facing in the US right now, it sounds like a safeguard.
Until this administration forces OpenAI to comply by secret government LLM training protocols that is...
If the headline is Claude Code then HN will go bonkers. Its a shame that it perceives OAI in a negative way. Very biased!
I’d use them both
Oh look, LLMs can _still_ pattern match words!
I'd want at least a parallel, after-the-fact rulings by an LLM, so we can see how bad judges are.
I really think this is one of the areas LLMs can shine. Justice could be more fair, and more speedy. Human judges can review appeals against LLM rulings.
For civil cases, both parties should be allowed to appeal an LLM ruling, for criminal cases only the defendant, or a victim should be allowed to appeal an LLM ruling (not the prosecution).
Humans are extremely unfair and biased. LLM training could be crafted carefully and using well and publicly scrutinize-able training datasets and methodologies.
If you disagree (at least in the US), you may not be aware of how dire the justice system is. There is a reason ICE randomly locking Americans up isn't stirring the pot. This stuff is normal. If a cop doesn't like you, they can lock you up randomly without any good reason for 48 hours, especially if they believe you can't afford to fight back afterwards. They can and do charge people in bad-faith (trumped up charges), and guess what? you might be lucky and get bail. But guess also what? You can't bail yourself out, if you have no one to bail you out, you're stuck until the trial date, in prison.
Imagine spending 3-5 days in jail (weekend in between) without charges. There are people that wait for trial in jail for months and years, and then they get released before even seeing a trial because of how ridiculous the charges were to begin with. This injustice is a result of humans not processing cases fast enough. Even in just 48 hours, do you have any idea how much it can destroy a person's life? It's literally death sentence for some people. You're never the same after all this. and you were innocent to begin with.
Let's say you do make it to trial, it takes years sometimes to prove your own innocence. and you may not even be granted bail, or you may not know anyone who can afford to spare a few thousand dollars to bail you out.
94%+ of federal cases don't even make it to trial, they end up in plea-bargain agreements, because if you don't agree to trumped up charges, they'll stack charges on you, so that you'll either face 90 years in prison or a year with plea-bargain. a sentence given to murderers and the worst of society, if you lose a trial, or a year if you falsely admit your guilt. losing a non-binding LLM trial could be a requirement for all plea-bargains to avoid this injustice.
Don't even get me started on how utter fecal matter like how you dress, how you comb your hair, your ethnicity, how you sound, your last name, what zip code you find yourself in, the mood of the judge, how hungry the judge is, or their glucose level, how much sleep the judge had. all these factors matter. Juries are even worse, they're a literal coin-toss practically.
I say let LLMs be the first layer of justice, let a human judge turn over their judgement, let justice be swift where possible, without making room for injustice. Allow defendants to choose to wait for a human judge instead if they want. Most I'm sure will take a chance with the LLM, and if that isn't in their favor, nothing changes because they'll now be facing a human judge like they would have otherwise. we can eve talk about sealing the details of the LLM's judgement while appeals are in progress to avoid biasing appellate judges and juries.
Or.. you know.. we could dispense with jail? If cops think someone needs to be placed under arrest, they should prove to a judge within 12 hours that the person is a danger to the community. if they're not a danger, ankle monitors should be placed on them, with no restriction on their movement so long as they remain in the jurisdiction. or house-arrest for serious charges. violating terms would mean actual jail. If you don't like LLMs, I hope you support this instead at the very least. The current system is an abomination and an utter perversion of justice.
I'd prefer caning like they do in Singapore and few other places. brutal, but swift, and you can get back to your life without the cruel bureaucracy destroying or murdering you.
No No No No No No
"In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all."
Can we please file the idea of AI judges under the “fuck no” category.
Now with bonus hallucinations of statute and case law!!!
That's not what this study shows