I made an animation showing the Top 10 most-cited Supreme Court cases every year since 1792. It's remarkable how citations (by federal and state courts) have exploded in frequency in the last half century.

I think @ProfArbel is spot on here. Hallucinations, for all their notoriety, are largely a short-term engineering problem. To my mind, the far more important question is how the legal profession and academy should evolve to work synergistically with machines that will soon be far more capable of complex analytical work than we are.

An interesting bit of trivia—the Texas Business Court is actually located on the first floor of the Texas A&M School of Law. We even share a break room. But shockingly, no one yet has reacted to my go-to greeting: “Howey doing?”

Admittedly an unpopular opinion, but I think even Yosemite Village itself is hugely disappointing. Imagine how much more majestic the valley would be without a grocery store (and federal court!) between El Capitan and Half Dome. Minimally, it should be like Zion, with lodging outside the valley, and low footprint transit in.

This is pretty wild. Basically, during sentencing, an AI video was shown that depicts the deceased victim sharing hypothetical posthumous comments (see below). After the AI video played, the judge was visibly emotional, stating, "I love that AI, thank you." He then sentenced the defendant to a longer prison term than what the prosecution even asked for.

There’s a pretty well known evidence case (Bankcard America v. Universal Bancard) where a 7th Circuit panel reverses Posner, who was sitting by designation. Part of that opinion has a FRE 408 issue, where not even harmless error review could save Posner from 3-0 reversal by his colleagues. At the same time, Posner has written some of the best opinions on evidence law in the last half century. So an interesting anecdote.

A fantastic article that is sure to play a pivotal role in conversations about how to scrutinize AI evidence. Congrats @BellinJ!

Apropos of the Navier–Stokes news, I thought I'd share one of my favorite books in my collection. It's from J. Robert Oppenheimer's private library (gifted to him by MIT's C.C. Lin) and includes Oppenheimer's annotations in the bibliography commenting on related research.

Yesterday, I was reading my copy of Greenleaf on Evidence for a research project, when this 130-year-old political ad fell out from between some pages. Turns out, it's from Charles Beebe's 1896 mayoral campaign in Portland, Oregon. Beebe lost the election to Sylvester Pennoyer, of Pennoyer v. Neff fame.

I agree with Orin. And from my vantage, there seems to be a growing divide between two camps in the academy. The first treats knowledge claims as a product and, so long as those claims are true and useful, the involvement of AI in their generation is largely immaterial. The second sees the value of knowledge claims as inseparable from provenance, with the worth of a claim inextricably bound up with its genesis. My (admittedly armchair) sense is that the divide centers roughly on determinacy, both within and beyond the legal academy. In determinate fields (or jurisprudential modalities), where the academy seeks objective, falsifiable findings, the first camp's norms dominate. For example, it makes little difference whether Copernicus or an AI proposes the heliocentric model of our solar system. The key is that it is correct, which carries meaningful implications for future knowledge discovery. In indeterminate fields, where the academic pursuit is instead driven by judgment, reasoning, and persuasion, the second camp's norms predominate. In these spaces, the "right answer" to an issue isn't discerned by acquiring some heretofore missing knowledge, but rather by "making the case" for the normatively optimal path forward given the (fully explicable) tradeoffs at issue. Within this framework, having AI craft an argument feels much more uncomfortable, as it involves outsourcing considerations of morality and equity to a synthetic machine. With apologies to Langdell, my sense is that most of the legal academy's work falls in the second camp, and I therefore expect that its norms will develop in an AI-skeptical direction as a result. At least for anything beyond ministerial tasks like cite-checking, proofreading, and editing.

A cool find for evidence folks. For those who teach Dallas County, here is the actual newspaper clipping that Judge Wisdom (again, fantastic name) deemed admissible over a hearsay objection: