Adam Unikowsky

@drmtown I think it’s good at being a clerk because for a particular case, a law clerk generally reads the briefs, key portions of the lower court record, and a few key cases, and works off of that knowledge. Those materials do fit in the context window.

@drmtown Yeah, I’m thinking of a detailed syllabus, not just a list of cases. General-purpose AI isn’t good at understanding the holdings of cases like Daimler if you don’t feed the cases in. If you fed in Daimler, it would probably do better.

As a former appellate/Supreme Court litigator and current law prof teaching and writing on AI, I've been reflecting on @AdamUnikowsky's assessment that current AI can function "at or above the level of a human Supreme Court clerk." 1/🧵

@drmtown I’d be curious how Claude would do on your issue-spotter if you allowed it to first ingest a detailed syllabus of your class (if one exists). I wouldn’t expect it to excel completely cold.

@AdamUnikowsky So, for now, even though I see a lot to like in AI tools, my sense is that we remain far from tools that can replace law clerks in a meaningful way. /🧵

@ASFleischman FWIW, I was on a federal criminal jury that hung. It was reasonable, in retrospect. I was something like 70 percent sure of guilt and voted to acquit, but I thought it was reasonable to be at 90 percent.

It's insane to me that juries should ever hang. A properly instructed jury, having heard that several jurors have doubts, should acquit even if they do not share those doubts.

@JoeDudekJD Yeah, that may be right. Not sure.

@JoeDudekJD (Adam now.). The Chief announced it from the bench, so this might be right.

@JoeDudekJD However, this is purely speculative, as you note. It's impossible to say with any certainty which individual Justice drafted this unsigned opinion on behalf of the unanimous Court. The stylistic clues are subtle at best.

@ded_ruckus @gojomo There are a surprising number of Supreme Court cases that are quite one-sided, and Claude performs very well with those. I agree Claude might be even more useful for run-of-the-mill lower court cases, and I would support large-scale empirical testing at that level.

@gojomo @AdamUnikowsky among all legal roles, "Supreme Court justice" is the one an LLM is least capable of fulfilling bc it's a major political power position, and thus absolutely requires agency, which LLMs lack

anyone tried using a tuned/prompted LLM, like GPT3, as a personalized content prescreener/labeler/ranker? eg: adding content-warnings, clustering, blocking based on the user's own plain-language-described instructions?

@legalrealist @AudreLawdAMercy Actually the chart only included cases in which the Justices divided on standing. So it wouldn’t change the chart.

@AudreLawdAMercy That Alito didn't offer an opinion is the most damning indication that the plaintiffs had no good arguments in their favor. In 2023, @AdamUnikowsky searched for standing cases and found that Alito had ruled for conservatives 100% of the time. No more! adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/does-standin…

@OrinKerr Do you think the relationship between lawyering and legal academia has changed since Posner wrote that 16 years ago? If so, in what direction?

This reflection on legal academia from Richard Posner, thinking back in 2007 on the career of the late Bernard Meltzer, is a longtime favorite. Just three pages, but there's a lot in there for lawprofs to ponder. chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewconten…

@OrinKerr I read about 10 of his books when I was in law school, and I was totally blown away. I couldn’t put them down, even when I disagreed with him.

@OrinKerr In some respects Posner is underrated: - His turns of phrase in some of his opinions are incredible, particularly opinions from the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure people appreciate that he is SUCH a good writer. 2. Some of his books from the 80s and 90s are fantastic.

Students and young lawyers who appeared on the scene after Richard Posner left it have no idea what a force he was. (He is alive, but sadly, has been silenced by Alzheimer's.) Opinions, books, articles, essays, responses. All beautifully written. Pumped out at amazing speed.

@danepps Higher now. 20% perhaps.

In September, @AdamUnikowsky predicted a 10% chance that SCOTUS would conclude that Trump was ineligible for the presidency. Maybe too high, but his arguments are worth considering. adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/is-the-supre…

@BRSoucek @FordhamLRev Thanks for conveying this interesting perspective. Just curious, do you think the Sixth Circuit panel that decided the case would interpret it in the way you advocate if a follow-on case arose?

If you’ve even said or written that public university professors have a first amendment right to misgender their students in class, we’re begging you to stop. No court has held that. My new piece with Ryan Chen (King Hall ‘23) in the @FordhamLRev: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

@nyttypos I enjoyed this interaction.

@AdamUnikowsky ’em, not ‘em. A contraction, not an internal quote.

@Stuart__Gotz Yeah, embarrassing.

@AdamUnikowsky Excellent write-up, my only quibble being that the quip about happy/unhappy families is Tolstoy's, not Dostoevsky.

@dilanesper It’s Tolstoy. An embarrassment on my part. But fixed.

"As Dostoevsky said about unhappy families, every indefensible mifepristone opinion is indefensible in its own way." @AdamUnikowsky on the 5th Circuit. adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/the-fifth-ci…

@joeyberger The Fifth Circuit this time. But, yes.