It has been a while since my last post on the Volokh Conspiracy. In 2021, I became associate dean at George Washington and did not have time to write. Last year, I switched associate dean roles and my portfolio became smaller, so I was fortunate to have some time to return to scholarship and to complete several articles. I'll begin my return to blogging by writing a series of posts offering shorter versions of the key arguments in a recently completed article that I have now submitted to law reviews, entitled The Cost of Justice at the Dawn of AI.
The article explores how changes in the productivity of lawyers affect the legal system and how legal actors should prepare for a future that may feature lawyers who are either more or less productive than today, depending in part on how artificial intelligence develops. The article's simplest claim is that the legal literature ought to pay more attention to the productivity of the legal sector, because changes in legal productivity directly affect the cost of legal services. Legal costs in turn affect how successfully the legal system can perform the core mission of ensuring that like cases are treated alike while cases are treated differently when applicable legal principles so demand.
The preeminent economic model for considering changes in the costs of goods and services over time is William Baumol's cost disease. This model is perhaps best known as providing an explanation for why the costs of college education and of health care have increased faster than inflation in recent decades. The essential story is that those sectors have enjoyed lower productivity increases than productive sectors like agriculture, textiles, or technology, and so products have become more expensive. Arguments that any given market is afflicted with the cost disease can be contested. Maybe, one might argue, educational costs have risen in large part because the core educational product—a professor lecturing in a classroom—has been bundled with increasingly lavish complementary services, such as ever-improving food and ever-increasing numbers of administrators to help students navigate their way through college.
