I have a question about how to present the results of legal scholarship generated in part with AI. I pose it as "an April 2026 question" because what AI can do is changing quickly. I would guess that how we think about AI assistance in legal scholarship will change over time, too. But I wanted to explain why I ask, and then open it up for feedback. I'm very interested in your thoughts.
I'm going to present the question in two posts. In this post, I'm going to explain why I turned to AI for help with a scholarly problem I had. In my next post, I will explain what AI was able to do and present my question about what I should do with what AI produced.
Here's the context. A few years ago, I wrote a law review article, Decryption Originalism: The Lessons of Burr, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 905 (2021). The article sought to understand the original public meaning of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and its possible application to unlocking cell phones. It was based on a fascinating historical coincidence: In 1807, in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, there had been an extensive oral argument and then subsequent opinion by Chief Justice Marshall on how the privilege applied to obtaining testimony from Burr's private secretary about an letter in cipher that Burr was thought to have sent.
