Letters From Our Readers: Courting AI
Courting AI
In Amanda Robert’s “May It Please the Court” (Winter 2026, page 10), explaining why judges may utilize AI for proofing and editing but never for decision-making, Louisiana’s Judge Scott Schlegel said: “It’s part of the social contract—you want a human being struggling through the difficulties of a case and making a decision, not a bot.”
Perhaps Judge Schlegel is on to something about why we value a decision made by a human instead of a robot judge, assuming that the decision is otherwise just as legally correct (and perhaps even more legally correct insofar as it is more untethered from bias).
AI never struggles with decision-making. It would seem impossible to prompt AI to struggle—wrestle with a decision—while judges toil daily with decision-making. Struggling, indeed suffering to some degree with the difficulties of a case, remains solely a human function.
There’s the old saw about disciplining children: “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” and it is not wrong. We shouldn’t be surprised if many a sentence causes the judge more pain to deliver than the defendant undergoes in hearing it pronounced. This isn’t to say that the judge suffers imprisonment alongside any defendant, but in some ways, judges do participate in the suffering that necessarily falls upon the litigant who loses. They feel it.
AI is immune from that singular human experience—the anxiety of struggling; suffering with the real possibility of getting it wrong. And that lack is far from insignificant.
Thomas E. Simmons
Vermillion, South Dakota
Humble thyself
I just read Erin E. Rhinehart’s “Put Your Ego Aside” (Winter 2026, page 16) of the ABA Journal.
Your article should be required reading for every single law student. I made that mistake as a young attorney; I did not view the profession as it really is. I would hate for other young attorneys to make that mistake. Thank you for writing it.
Robert J. Ansell
New Hyde Park, New York
When you think about it
Good article about the virtues of introverts and extroverts working together (“Matched Pairs,” Winter 2026, page 29). One aphorism I feel has always summed up the difference is: “Introverts think before speaking; extroverts think while speaking.”
Gordon Griller
Scottsdale, Arizona
Bar talk
In reference to Julianne Hill’s “A dozen ways that bar licensure could change in 2026” (ABAJournal.com, Dec. 24), efforts to expand access to legal services for underserved sectors are meritorious and critically important. An honest self-evaluation by the profession may reveal that one way to do that effectively is to institute training programs for practitioners that are far less expensive and extensive than the traditional three-year JD schooling, with rigorous testing and certification more specifically focused than a traditional bar exam. Will the profession and the state regulators have the courage to allow this alternative?
But then, assuming that the answer is yes, the needs of underserved communities cannot, in a society of freedom of choice and contract, be a limiting exception. If it be conceded that competence to perform one or another service traditionally subsumed within “the practice of law” can be demonstrated by individuals who have never attended law school, there will be no valid basis to deny to any individual who can demonstrate the requisite proficiency the right to perform such services for any client. Who could honestly insist that a sophisticated consumer of legal services familiar with his own situation and needs is never in a better position than a state bar examination board to decide whether a trusted close adviser is capable of navigating the shoals and sandbars of a choppy legal sea?
Eventually, we may conclude that within the vast landscape we now call the practice of law, there are many services and solutions that may best be provided not by lawyers with JD degrees and engraved certificates but by others with different training—or even only self-training—who can do what we all do day after day: Convince our clients that we can do for them what they need done. And we may realize that the proper role of the state is at most to provide resources and oversee competence in a nonarbitrary way, not to pretend that the “right to practice law” is a one-size-fits-all commodity created by the state that it may grant or withhold at will. Consider the momentous implications of that.
Robert Kantowitz
Lawrence, New York
Correction
“Legal Rebels,” (Winter, page 36) erroneously stated that trusts and estates will be a core testing area on the NextGen Bar Exam in 2028. It is slated to continue to be a topic covered in performance test sections.
The Journal regrets the error.
Letters to the Editor
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