The Supreme Court's approach to factual evidence is raising serious concerns about judicial integrity, according to Duncan Hosie, Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, writing in The Atlantic. In his analysis, Hosie examines how the Court's conservative majority has ...repeatedly disregarded evidentiary records carefully established by lower courts.

America's constitutional and procedural order gives district courts special fact-finding tools and responsibilities for good reason. The "clear-error deference" standard typically prevents reviewing courts from setting aside lower court findings unless they are clearly erroneous. However, the Roberts Court's willingness to circumvent this standard represents a troubling departure from institutional norms that protect against the substitution of ideology for legal reasoning.

When the highest court disregards the painstaking work of lower courts to document facts, it abandons a fundamental judicial responsibility—grounding legal power in evidence rather than preference.

Read the full analysis: https://brnw.ch/21x5mc2

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