Language Models and the Law

Abstract: 
As a text-based professional area, the legal domain is particularly relevant for language model applications. In this talk, I will highlight three dimensions of interaction between law and language models. First, I will discuss recent and in-progress legal scholarship that uses language models, with particular attention to an in-progress effort to model cycles of jurisprudence over the last 150 years. In some periods, law regards itself as a closed, logical system for producing legal determinations; in other periods, law regards itself as open, innovative, and expressly responsive to social and economic needs. When does one style predominate over the others? Second, I will discuss areas of legal practice that appear to be first-movers in the use of language models and suggest legal tasks on which the models in their current forms may be more or less well-suited. Third, I will briefly suggest salient open legal issues that arise from language models.

Bio:
Jed Stiglitz is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Cornell Law School. His research focuses on administrative law, with an emphasis on the relationship between judicial review and the values of trust and accountability in the administrative state. He also studies legislation and other areas of public law. His work integrates legal theory and quantitative social science. 

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Journal of Legal Studies, and the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, among other journals. His co-authored book on American elections was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. His most recent book, on the architecture of the modern state, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

He earned a JD from Stanford Law School, and a PhD (political science) and MA (economics) from Stanford University. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Stephen F. Williams of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.