ChatGPT, AI Large Language Models, and Law

This Essay explores Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT/GPT-4, detailing the advances and challenges in applying AI to law. It first explains how these AI technologies work at an understandable level. It then examines the significant evolution of LLMs since 2022 and their improved capabilities in understanding and generating complex documents, such as legal texts. Finally, this Essay discusses the limitations of these technologies, offering a balanced view of their potential role in legal work

Constructing AI Speech

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT can now produce convincingly human speech, at scale. It is tempting to ask whether such AI-generated content “disrupts” the law. That, we claim, is the wrong question. It characterizes the law as inherently reactive, rather than proactive, and fails to reveal how what may look like “disruption” in one area of the law is business as usual in another. We challenge the prevailing notion that technology inherently disrupts law, proposing instead that law and technology co-construct each other in a dynamic interplay reflective of societal priorities and political power. This Essay instead deploys and expounds upon the method of “legal construction of technology.” By removing the blinders of technological determinism and instead performing legal construction of technology, legal scholars and policymakers can more effectively ensure that the integration of AI systems into society aligns with key values and legal principles. Legal construction of technology, as we perform it, consists of examining the ways in which the law’s objects, values, and institutions constitute legal sensemaking of new uses of technology. For example, the First Amendment governs “speech” and “speakers” toward a number of theoretical goals, largely through the court system. This leads to a particular set of puzzles, such as the fact that AI systems are not human speakers with human intent. But other areas of the law construct AI systems very differently. Content-moderation law regulates communications platforms and networks toward the goals of balancing harms against free speech and innovation; risk regulation, increasingly being deployed to regulate AI systems, regulates risky complex systems toward the ends of mitigating both physical and dignitary harms; and consumer-protection law regulates businesses and consumers toward the goals of maintaining fair and efficient markets. In none of these other legal constructions of AI is AI’s lack of human intent a problem. By going through each example in turn, this Essay aims to demonstrate the benefits of looking at AI-generated content through the lens of legal construction of technology, instead of asking whether the technology disrupts the law. We aim, too, to convince policymakers and scholars of the benefits of the method: it is descriptively accurate, yields concrete policy revelations, and can in practice be deeply empowering for policymakers and scholars alike. AI systems do not in some abstract sense disrupt the law. Under a values-driven rather than technology-driven approach to technology policy, the law can do far more than just react

Immigration Detention Abolition and the Violence of Digital Cages

The United States has a long history of pernicious immigration enforcement and surveillance. Today, in addition to more than 34,000 people held in immigration detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shackles and surveils an astounding 376,000 people under its “Alternatives to Detention” (“ATD”) program. The number of people subjected to this surveillance has grown dramatically in the last two decades, from just about 1,700 in 2005. ICE’s rapidly expanding Alternatives to Detention program is a “digital cage,” consisting of GPS-outfitted ankle shackles and invasive phone and location tracking. Government officials and some immigrant advocates have characterized these digital cages as a humane “reform,” ostensibly an effort to decrease the number of people behind bars. This Article challenges that framework, illuminating how, instead of moving us closer to justice and liberation—and toward abolition—digital cages disperse the violence of immigration enforcement and surveillance more broadly, and more insidiously, ensnaring hundreds of thousands more immigrants, families, and communities. The increasing digitization of immigration enforcement and surveillance is part of a growing, and expansive, geography of violence. This Article argues that if we want to take deportation abolition seriously—that is, an end to immigrant detention, enforcement, and deportation—we must consider the impact of this growing surveillance. Building upondeportation abolition literature situating immigration detention as a form of violence, this Article posits that rather than mitigate violence, digital cages create a “violence of invisibility” that is equally, if not more, dangerous. Digital cages, masquerading as a more palatable version of enforcement and surveillance, create devastating harms that are hidden in plain sight, while duping us into thinking of these measures as more humane. This Article concludes by arguing that digital cages are a “reformist reform” that merely make more efficient the kind of oppressive and racialized violence that has long informed the United States’ immigration enforcement regime. If we truly seek an end to this violence, this Article argues for abolition—not just of detention, but of digital cages as well

Second Amendment Immigration Exceptionalism

This Essay critiques the decision to uphold federal gun restrictions on unlawfully present noncitizens on the basis of immigration exceptionalism. It argues that courts should avoid applying bespoke constitutionalism to criminal laws, including gun laws, simply because the law regulates noncitizens. This Essay shows why such exceptional modes misapprehend long-decided Supreme Court cases and well-established legal doctrine. Further, it warns that an exceptional approach to Second Amendment claims by unlawfully present noncitizens cannot be cabined to either firearms or the unlawfully present. Rather, it portends a wider gulf in constitutional protections for all noncitizens across a variety of fundamental criminal and civil rights

How to Search the Colorado Session Laws Collection In Colorado Law’s Scholarly Commons

Directions for how to search the Colorado Session Laws collection in Scholarly Commons.https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/session-laws-2001-2050/10352/thumbnail.jp