Document Type
Article
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly intruding into many professions, from publishing and healthcare to engineering, graphic design, and the law. Law firms are adopting AI for discovery, factual summaries, and briefing. Many courts are embracing AI to streamline docket management and filings. Even some judges are experimenting with AI. This article describes an experiment with the use of an AI Judge to decide both an expert witness issue embedded in a South Dakota Supreme Court appeal and a South Dakota Circuit Court legal malpractice issue. We then compare the AI-generated opinion with the opinions penned by the Judge and Justice, respectively. We conclude that the results suggest that AI cannot consistently replicate the heavy lifting of South Dakota jurists. Still, the results are, we think, intriguing, perhaps troubling, and even provocative. AI may currently be at the level of the Model T Ford, but before we know it, AI will have advanced to twenty-first-century supercar performance levels and we should rightly devote our collective attention to what that will mean to the vocation of judging and for the enterprise of deciding legal issues.
DOI
https://www.doi.org/10.70657/SDLR.V71.I2.354
Recommended Citation
Justin Huston & Thomas E. Simmons,
May it Please the Artificial Intelligence: Experimental AI-Authored Jurisprudence and Authentic Human-Authored Counterparts,
71
S.D. L. Rev.
354
(2026).
Available at:
https://red.library.usd.edu/sdlrev/vol71/iss2/9