Category: state courts

Colorado judges discuss the pros and cons of AI

This is an interesting article on a recent panel discussion in Colorado, in which state and federal judges shared the courts’ emerging views on generative AI with the rest of the legal community. It is clear that, like the rest of us, courts are struggling to achieve the right balance between AI as an impermissible shortcut and AI as an efficient game-changer.

And AI can absolutely be that game-changer for written materials. Current iterations of AI tend to write in a dull and wooden style, at least for legal work. But short motions and briefs can be drafted in a matter of seconds (and polished within minutes), rather than taking hours to draft and revise. And the output is grammatically correct and readable, which is a huge plus. Thoughtful use of AI in written submissions might alleviate the problems that stem from the notable decline in younger lawyer’s writing skills.

It seems that we are headed in the direction of treating AI like a paralegal or inexperienced attorney — eventually its use will be explicitly permitted, but failure to confirm all the details will be an ethical violation in itself. Stay tuned.

Illinois courts grapple with forum shopping law

The Judicial Conference of the United States made headlines last March when it instituted a new policy designed to prevent plaintiffs from strategically choosing a particular court (and really a particular judge) to hear their cases. The move toward random case assignment was an effort to balance a plaintiff’s traditional power to choose the forum (subject to important jurisdictional and venue limitations) against the growing scourge of “judge shopping” in cases seeking nationwide injunctions against federal government policies.

The Illinois Supreme Court is now confronting a similar question about a plaintiff’s limits on the choice of forum. In 2023, the Illinois legislature passed a law that requires constitutional challenges to state laws to be filed in either Cook County (the state’s largest county) or Sangamon County (the seat of state government). The law appears to have been a reaction to a series of lawsuits challenging legislation ending cash bail, banning assault weapons, or mandating specific actions in light of COVID-19. By limiting such suits (and those like them) to two designated counties, the state can restrict plaintiffs from selecting a court elsewhere in the state whose judges might be more sympathetic to a constitutional challenge. (Remember that Illinois trial judges are elected, and their political leanings may be easier to decipher as a result.)

But what if the plaintiff’s closest and most convenient court is not one of the two designated in the law? In the case now before the Illinois Supreme Court, a gun shop located in East Alton (just across the border from St. Louis, Missouri) brought a challenge to the constitutionality of a 2023 firearms regulation. The case was filed in Madison County, the plaintiff’s home county, whose courthouse is located about half an hour away. Citing the forum shopping law, the state (as defendant) tried to move the case to Sangamon County, which is about 90 minutes away. The judge based in Madison County denied the motion, arguing that forum shopping law denied parties their due process rights by depriving them of their ability to mount their best possible case. The state appealed.

On the face of it, this case is not an obvious example of forum shopping. The Madison County court is indeed the home court of the plaintiff and the most convenient location. Moreover, if judges are randomly assigned cases within a judicial circuit, Madison County does not provide a strategic advantage over Sangamon County. The former (located in the state’s Third Judicial Circuit) has 20 circuit judges; the latter (located in the Seventh Judicial Circuit) has 21. In either case a random assignment would give a plaintiff only a 5% chance of landing a specific judge.

Underlying all of this is the state legislature’s engagement in the administrative workings of the courts. It will be interesting to see how the state supreme court untangles this issue.

Weekend tibdits: Dog bites man, 3L runs for judge, Arkansas judges make nice

A few interesting state court stories from the last couple of days:

  • Repairs on a courthouse elevator in Texas were delayed after the technician was bitten by a dog on his way into the building. A few rabies shots later, the tech and the elevator were both doing fine. The dog remains at large.
  • A 24-year old student at Brooklyn Law School is planning to run for magistrate judge in his local Pennsylvania community this spring, and will campaign while completing his studies. The judicial position does not require a law degree in any event. He plans to file as both a Democrat and Republican for purposes of the state primary.
  • The Arkansas Judicial Council, working to mend fences after the new chief justice attempted unsuccessfully to fire ten senior court employees, issued a formal resolution recognizing the employees’ service to the judiciary.

California courts grow “Judges in the Classroom” program

Here is a nice story out of California, where members of the state judiciary are visitng K-12 classrooms to talk about the judiciary and civics more generally. Some visits include mock trials or Career Day talks.

In an era where public trust in all institutions, especially government institutions, is in decline, it is great to see judges sharing some of their time with schoolchildren. Today’s elementary school kids are tomorrow’s voters and (hopefully) engaged citizens. A single visit might promote a lifetime of healthy respect for the rule of law and our democratic society.

Arkansas Chief Justice tries to fire senior court administrators, is thoroughly rebuffed

A bizarre story out of Arkansas, where new Chief Justice Karen Baker decided that one of her first official acts would be to fire ten court employees, most of them senior administrators. On Thursday, January 2, one day after being sworn in, Baker apparently confronted Supreme Court Chief of Police Pete Hollingsworth and Director of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) Marty Sullivan, and announced that she was planning to fire them. Baker later prepared termination letters for Hollingsworth, Sullivan, and eight other senior court officials. But Sullivan refused to accept the termination, and things got interesting.

Continue reading “Arkansas Chief Justice tries to fire senior court administrators, is thoroughly rebuffed”

Georgia judge dies in courthouse by apparent suicide

A tragic story as the year turns over: Georgia state judge Stephen Yekel was found dead in his courtroom Tuesday morning. The cause of death appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Yekel was elected to the bench in May 2022 but was not reelected this past November. His term was set to end on December 31. A few weeks ago, Yekel attempted to resign his position effective December 30, apparently to nullify the election results by creating a new vacancy that could be filled by Governor Brian Kemp. But Kemp refused to accept the resignation and deferred to the will of the voters.

Our thoughts are with Judge Yekel’s family and friends.

Arizona voters reject radical changes to judicial selection and evaluation

Arizonans faced a ballot initiative last month that would have overhauled the state’s judicial selection system. It was a highly partisan proposal that would have jettisoned the state’s longstanding system of evaluating and retaining judges at the end of a set term of office, and replaced it with retroactive life terms dependent only on oddly defined categories of “good behavior.”

The Arizona Capitol Times has a nice summary of the voters’ decisive rejection to the proposal, which has the effect of maintaining the state’s status quo. This is a victory for all Arizonans, who preserved their best system for maintaining a fair and balanced judiciary.

The courts are still in Phase I of their relationship with AI — but change is coming

This week, the Colorado Court of Appeals issued its first opinion cautioning litigants about relying on generative AI to draft legal briefs, joining a number of other courts that have similarly warned (and sometimes sanctioned) parties and lawyers for including “bogus” AI-generated case citations. 

Judicial pushback against the errors caused by ChatGPT and other early publicly available AI models is sound policy, no different than teachers balking at AI-generated student essays. The AI programs currently available to the public can be astonishing in their creativity, but are also prone to hallucination and more often than not produce a mediocre result. Professor Ethan Mollick has compared such programs to a tireless but clumsy intern — eager to please and lightning fast, but lacking polish, sophistication, or accountability to reality. So it is natural that the courts’ first priority is to put out the fire of fake case citations.

But one should not confuse legitimate concerns about flawed AI today with pessimism about the transformative power of AI going forward. AI’s large language models are learning very quickly, and a rapid influx of users will spur even more rapid development. Legal research services like Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw have introduced their own first-generation AI services, which aim to connect more rigorously to actual legal precedent. It will not be long before legal research is indeed faster, better, and more thorough than ever before — a change akin to the introduction of electronic legal databases in the 1980s.

The courts, too, are not too far off from embracing AI for their own purposes. In Phase II, judges and court staff will rely on AI to read briefs and transcripts, summarize arguments, check citations, and even produce questions for oral argument. In Phase III, they will use AI to draft opinions and orders, initially in low-stakes cases (to help with the workload) but eventually in high-stakes, complex litigation. In Phase IV, AI itself will hear the case, render the decision, and draft an order or opinion.

Phase IV may feel futuristic, but it is coming, and sooner than we think. State courts in particular are contending with a massive increase in self-represented litigants — individuals who have real legal problems but who cannot (or choose not to) pay a lawyer to help guide them through the system. Many have cases that are legally straightforward (such as a basic contract dispute) and may be willing to submit those cases to an AI “judge” with the promise of a quicker and less expensive resolution. As AI improves, such judging programs eventually will be available on demand and from the comfort of one’s own home, no different that the modern telehealth industry. They may start as private, ADR-style offerings that compete with courts for customers, but eventually court systems themselves will feel pressure to embrace the same technology.

Of course, courts will not move into AI judging lightly, and nothing will happen until the courts are convinced that whatever system they employ can guarantee an accurate application of existing law, preserve the guarantees of due process, and protect confidentiality as needed. But we are on cusp of a major technological transformation that could benefit resource-starved courts and decision-starved parties in equal measure.

Effort to speed up New Mexico criminal cases receives pushback

The chief judge of New Mexico’s First Judicial District (covering Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, and Los Alamos Counties) has proposed a case management order (CMO) aimed at speeding up the processing of criminal cases within the district. The order was intended to go into effect no later than January, but concerted pushback from attorneys and police and delaying implementation.

The need for faster case processing is evident: the average criminal case in the First Judicial District takes almost 300 days to reach a resolution, as compared to 224 days in the Second District (covering Albuquerque) and under 200 days in some rural districts. But prosecutors and defense attorneys jointly asserted that the real problem is a lack of resources, which no CMO can fix. They also complained that the proposed CMO imposed rules that were inconsistent with procedures in other parts of the state.

Both sides may be right about the challenges, but both should also continue working toward finding creative and viable solutions to reducing the average time to case resolution.