Judges Urged to Embrace AI, but Not When Writing Opinions

Judges should be broadly integrating artificial intelligence technologies in their chambers while approaching generative AI—which can produce text and audio automatically—with skepticism, experts say.

Pressed by judges and practitioners at the State Bar of Wisconsin annual meeting in Green Bay, both Louisiana state appeals court judge Scott Schlegel and Rutgers Law School Professor David Kemp said judges can ethically use AI to speed up court processes—so long as they steer clear of handing decision-making over to the bots.

“There’s absolute ‘yeses’ and absolute ‘nos’ and there’s a lot of gray in the middle we’re all working through right now,” Schlegel, ...