Julian Nyarko (Stanford), How Often Are Articles in Top Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?:
Over the last few weeks, there has been some interesting discussion around the use of AI in the writing of law review articles, with views among legal scholars varying quite widely. To me, the question of whether AI use ought to be prohibited or even just frowned upon is genuinely hard. …
[W]hatever one’s preferred normative position is, I thought it would be helpful to get a descriptive sense of how prevalent AI use actually is in legal research. So this is what I want to report on here. …
[L]et me briefly describe the dataset and methodology, just so it is clear what’s being measured. I collected all articles published since January 1 2025 from flagship law reviews of the T14, as measured by the 2026-27 U.S. News ranking. Because of a three-way tie, this set contains fifteen law reviews. In addition to the 2025 and 2026 articles, I also collected articles published between January 1 and May 28 of 2020. GPT-3 was released on May 29, so this latter set serves as a historical benchmark. In total, the set comprises 571 articles …
There is no AI signal in the 2020 benchmark set, suggesting that false positives should be very uncommon or nonexistent in this analysis. In 2025, AI use was rare: 9 out of 273 articles (3.3%) have any AI signal, with 5 articles (1.8%) containing an estimated share of AI-generated words exceeding 5%. The estimated share of AI written words across all articles is 0.20% in 2025. By 2026, AI signals became much more prevalent. Pangram identifies 25 out of 165 articles (15.2%) as containing AI-written content. …
The results suggest that AI use is widely distributed across articles in T14 flagship law reviews, with a clear increase compared to last year. This suggests that *someone* is using AI more in their writing. …
[W]hile I’m providing evidence of increased AI use in law review writing, as mentioned at the outset, I don’t mean to adjudicate whether this phenomenon is good or bad. The one caveat to that statement concerns Claude-slop. Because while I remain somewhat agnostic about AI-assisted writing, I am less agnostic about having to read load-bearing honest takes that surface the key distinction, do the real work, and explain that the problem is not the prose but the epistemics. That much seems worth stating plainly.
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