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2026 LLM x Law Hackathon
The hackathon wasn’t just a competition; it was a glimpse into what becomes possible when the people who understand AI and the people who understand law are finally in the same room, building together.
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Should courts use artificial intelligence? Daniel Ho, the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law and Director of RegLab, and Olivia Martin, JD/PhD candidate, RegLab Law Student Fellow and Knight-Hennessy Scholar, tackled this question at the D.C. Circuit Judicial Conference with ...striking findings.
Their research shows frontier AI models can analyze thousands of regulatory comments in minutes and conduct comprehensive statutory surveys—tasks that traditionally take days. But these same models exhibit critical flaws, including hallucinations and accepting fabricated legal premises.
The stakes: Without hands-on experience, courts risk falling behind litigants already using these tools—creating a dangerous information asymmetry in the courtroom.
Read their full analysis: https://brnw.ch/21x5k7l
Research from the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession gets a close look in the most recent New York Times Docket newsletter.
The study asks: If court records are presumptively public, why are so many federal civil filings sealed? The answer points to a system in which sealing ...requests are often uncontested, leaving judges as the public’s principal safeguard.
As study co-author Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom told the NYT’s Adam Liptak, there are legitimate reasons for secrecy and real trade-offs. But judges need to do more than simply rubber-stamp requests to seal materials that shape their decisions.
Read more in the NYT (subscription may be required): https://brnw.ch/21x5hM3
Read the Rhode Center’s policy brief: https://brnw.ch/21x5hM4
Stanford Law School research is at the center of a new Atlantic article examining what happens to political spending after fatal school shootings.
The study finds that pro-gun PACs sharply increase contributions to favored House candidates in competitive districts after children are killed... in school shootings. Eric Baldwin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford Law School, led the study, along with co-authors John J. Donohue III, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, and Takuma Iwasaki, a Stanford Law JSD candidate.
“The data shows that the gun lobby saves its political firepower for the moments when public grief is greatest and lawmakers are under the most pressure to act,” Baldwin tells The Atlantic.
“School Shootings and the Strategic Contributions of Gun Policy PACs in U.S. House Elections” was published earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read it here: https://brnw.ch/21x5g5h
Read more in The Atlantic (subscription may be required): https://brnw.ch/21x5g5i