Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Introduction to Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance (Cambridge University Press, 2025):

Administrative agencies that are responsible for running federal government operations have increasingly turned to chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools to offer guidance to the public about the law. Together, these tools can be thought of as “automated legal guidance.” These tools promise to be an easy-to-use source of information about underlying legal rules. But there is an unexpected catch. To make federal law accessible, the tools often flatten out complexities in the underlying legal system. As a result, when automated legal guidance tools offer “answers,” or explanations in response to questions, they may not, in fact, be accurate representations of the underlying law. Unfortunately, members of the public may rely upon these tools, unknowingly, at their peril.

Our book, Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2025), which we introduce in this chapter, builds on years of research we have undertaken to explore these automated legal guidance systems. In conducting our research, we interviewed federal agency officials who are responsible for creating and managing automated legal guidance tools. Their answers to the questions we posed offer insights into what agencies think about these tools and the roles they are serving.

Based on these insights, we explore not only the benefits of such tools, but also their costs, and examine the ways that some of these costs tie in with broader democracy deficits in the application of administrative law to the public. At its foundation, this book explores not only automated legal guidance systems, but also the deep-seated problem of having the government attempt to explain an extremely complex system of laws to a population that often cannot fully understand it. In writing this book, our goal is to offer a guide toward ways to best resolve this problem, especially considering technological innovation and other changes that seem to promise only more automation of the law by federal agencies in the future.

Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Automating Federal Agencies, 42 Yale J. on Reg.: Notice & Comment (Apr. 17, 2025)

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