John O. McGinnis (Northwestern Law), “The Scholar’s Telescope: AI and the Public Purpose of Legal Scholarship”
The abstract:
The controversy over artificial intelligence in legal scholarship exposes a deeper disagreement about what legal scholarship is for. This Essay argues that scholarship’s governing public purpose is to improve warranted public understanding of law and the reasons that should guide legal institutions. That purpose, rather than the amount of unaided labor invested in an article, should determine how AI may be used. From this account, the Essay derives a responsibility principle: scholars may use AI extensively, but they may publish only work whose material claims they have verified, whose intellectual debts they have reasonably investigated and acknowledged, and whose controlling judgments they understand and are prepared to defend. It distinguishes these threshold conditions of scholarly integrity from the separate question whether an article is sufficiently important, original, and illuminating to merit publication. It also develops a four-factor framework-materiality, opacity, verifiability, and substitution-for determining how much human supervision a particular use of AI requires. The Essay rejects AI coauthorship and argues that disclosure should concern epistemic methods needed to evaluate or reproduce a claim, not the complete history of an article’s production. It further contends that AI can promote warranted understanding of law by reducing advantages supplied by extensive institutional support. It offers model guidelines for law reviews to regulate the use of AI in legal publications. Finally, it tests the theory against a possible post-centaur future in which machines may produce superior scholarship without substantial human intellectual contribution.
Me:
No notes.
