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Full-Text Articles in Law
Revolutionizing Access To Justice: The Role Of Ai-Powered Chatbots And Retrieval-Augmented Generation In Legal Self-Help, Ayyoub Ajmi
Faculty Works
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present numerous opportunities to routinize and make the law more accessible to self-represented litigants, notably through AI chatbots employing natural language processing for conversational interactions. These chatbots exhibit legal reasoning abilities without explicit training on legal-specific datasets. However, they face challenges processing less common and more specific knowledge from their training data. Additionally, once trained, their static status makes them susceptible to knowledge obsolescence over time. This article explores the application of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance chatbot accuracy, drawing insights from a real-world implementation developed for a court system to support self-help litigants.
Statistical Precedent: Allocating Judicial Attention, Ryan W. Copus
Statistical Precedent: Allocating Judicial Attention, Ryan W. Copus
Faculty Works
Suffering from a well-covered “crisis of volume,” the United States Courts of Appeals have patched together an ad hoc system of triage in an effort to provide cases with sufficient attention. For example, only some cases are assigned to central staff, analyzed by law clerks, orally argued, debated over by judges, or decided in published opinions. The courts have evaded overt disaster by increasing the number of active, senior, and visiting judges, but the additional personnel poses its own demands on attention—judges must also pay attention to one another in order to coherently develop and apply the law. With too …
Justice Scalia's Truthiness And The Virtues Of Judicial Candor, Allen K. Rostron
Justice Scalia's Truthiness And The Virtues Of Judicial Candor, Allen K. Rostron
Faculty Works
Antonin Scalia is by far the Supreme Court’s greatest wit and most colorful personality. His judicial opinions are also remarkably passionate and frank. He has received intense criticism for supposedly being “too political” in some of his opinions, such as his scorching dissent in last year’s case about Arizona laws aimed at illegal immigrants or his bitter denunciation of the Court’s last major ruling on the detention of suspected terrorists. But what purpose is really served by judges hiding their motivations behind a false veneer of detachment and stilted formalism? Scalia can be so refreshingly candid in his judicial work …
Did The Madisonian Compromise Survive Detention At Guantanamo?, Lumen N. Mulligan
Did The Madisonian Compromise Survive Detention At Guantanamo?, Lumen N. Mulligan
Faculty Works
In this essay, I take up the Court’s less heralded second holding in Boumediene v. Bush - that a federal habeas court must have the institutional capacity to find facts, which in Boumediene itself meant that a federal district court must be available to the petitioners. Although this has gone largely unnoticed, I contend that this holding is inconsistent with the Madisonian Compromise - the standard view that the Constitution does not require jurisdiction in any federal court, except the Supreme Court. In fact, it appears that the Court adopted Justice Story’s position that the Constitution requires vesting of jurisdiction …
Federal Courts Not Federal Tribunals, Lumen N. Mulligan
Federal Courts Not Federal Tribunals, Lumen N. Mulligan
Faculty Works
The Court has employed inferred-cause-of-action doctrine to foster the rights of individuals, from injured workers to female college applicants to defrauded investors and targets of racial discrimination. Although the question of whether the federal courts ought to infer causes of action from federal statutes is an old chestnut in the federal-courts field, a new basis for barring such a practice has arisen, requiring fresh attention to the Court's inferred-cause-of-action doctrine. This new position asserts that inferring a cause of action is not merely poor judicial policy but extra-jurisdictional under either 28 U.S.C. - 1331 or Article III. Borrowing a phrase …