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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Isn’t Biery making the legal argument of “administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster”, i.e., the Fourth Amendment? Your claim of “exactly 0 legal arguments” seems exaggerated.

I ran the opinion through AI (Claude), and while it agrees that it’s heavy on rhetoric, it also said the 4A argument is strong.

Also, small typo in your appeals sentence: it should be “you’re”, as in “you are”, not “your” (possessive).

Also also, you may enjoy this joke: What's the difference between God and a federal judge? God doesn't think he's a federal judge!

Claude

I'm quite surprised at this result, because gemini and chatgpt are both adamant that the opinion has no legs to stand on.

I know that Claude used to have document tokenization problems, which caused quite bad hallucinations when a document was attached. I'm not sure if it's been fixed or not.

The claim that Administrative Warrants are categorically invalid under the 4th because "the fox can't guard the henhouse" is fantastically stupid, and completely upends the entire apparatus of administrative enforcement. Administrative Warrants not signed by a judge have never been held so, only when attempting to enter private areas (such as a home) would the 4th Amendment be implicated. As the two were picked up in public, the reasoning is facile.

There are precisely two federal judges I would trust to oppose administrative warrants on originalist principles. There is a coherent argument to be made (that I mostly agree with), but there is a zero percent chance this judge would apply such a principle fairly across the board.

Not to worry, it's one of those "category invalid" things that will be categorically invalid only when it's convenient for the side making the decision. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, for instance, will never have a similar problem.

Please don’t run things through AI and accept its output. Lawyer here and AI gets things wrong all the time.

I've seen a few examples of lawyers praising AI for its legal mind. What does it get wrong in your experience?

I think the replies are somewhat overstating how bad LLMs are - they do have all those failure modes, but the rate at which they fail in those ways isn't that high. And also sort of assuming that the alternative is any better - getting a smart domain expert to spend some time answering you question is of course much better than getting an LLM to, but you weren't gonna do that anyway. At the same time, I agree that 'I (nonexpert) asked Claude and it said this' isn't that useful of a contribution, and when not guided by an expert the LLMs are probably not gonna be that informative on an issue of this complexity.

LLMs are generally terrible at any sort of task where accuracy and rigor are core constraints. Imagine the full range of legal opinions that exist on the internet, intelligent, retarded, and everything in between. Now imagine what the average of that mass of opinions would look like. That's effectively what you're getting when you ask an LLM for legal advice.

Otherwise see @gattsuru's comment below.

Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim. That doesn't completely destroy his analysis about AI effectiveness, but it does undermine how and what he's evaluating.

For more specific problems:

  • Hallucinations happen. Newer models are better about avoiding them, but they're still prone to it. This is critical because, whether it's a hallucinated citation, incorrectly summarizing the contents of a citation, or hallucinating facts or claims by parties in the case, it's a central example of sanctionable behavior.
  • Even large-context models struggle with the amount of information in a lawsuit, and most models aren't large-context (and many APIs will obfuscate when you're getting downgraded).
  • Worse, they get loopy under certain nonobvious situations: going toward the last 20% of a context size, repeating a word too often during a prompt, so on.
  • It can be very hard to get the LLM to understand core constraints for a specific environment. Citing out-of-circuit cases as if they were binding, not checking if a case was overruled or constrained to its own four corners, even basic formatting stuff can be a problem, here.
  • Most LLMs, unless very carefully prompted, are people-pleasers. They'll quite happily give you the answer you want, even if you aren't explicitly saying what you want, even when this means disregarding well-known counterexamples

There's a defense that people, even lawyers or judges, make many of these same mistakes, and that's true. It's still a problem and a limitation.

AI can be a useful tool, but it's a tool.

I disagree with your claim that Unikowsky's analysis on Trump is outcome-driven against him. Directly, you accused him of letting his bias against Trump drive him to think that Trump could be removed from the ballot. Yet, when the case was actually decided, you can read Unikowsky's take on it. He doesn't explicitly say what he thinks should've been decided, but while he thinks that from the 'law nerd' perspective it's wrong, he ultimately seems more sympathetic than not to the claim that the practical consequences of keeping Trump on the ballot mean it's worth deciding it 'wrongly'. Which is outcome-driven in the other direction!

IME, everything you say about LLMs here is correct ... which is why anyone using AI for something of legal import ought to use multiple AIs to check each other's work. Having Grok / Opus / GPT fight it out should be more effective.

... summoning not 1, but 3 uncanny entities to grant wishes in tandem ... I think I'm starting to get why demonic possession coming in groups rather than one demon is so common. (That, or hallucinations and ticks don't respond to exorcisms as well but do know how to change their name mid exorcism, but the one that's a cautionary tale about overusing AI is more immediately relevant?)

God damn it, please reality would you stop making the more unhinged exegeses of Revelations sound like they're coming true? I mean, the kind of thing that was all about "the locusts are helicopters, the sign on the forehead and hand is embedded chips". Now we've got "our name is Legion for we are many" due to Grok et al all uniting in one hivemind (Moltbook).

I really did not want to be living in the End Times.

I read the article. It’s somewhat interesting but the interesting question is what did prediction markets say. Most SCOTUS opinions are easily predicted (and frequently written about).

I’d expect an LLM to do better there compared to areas with less items written. In the example I was referencing, if an LLM could step back and try to understand the regulatory scheme, it would have understood its answer was counter to the scheme. Once you know that, you have to really study to make sure you aren’t missing something. But not sure it’s capable of that meta check.

Pretty much everything. Literally yesterday there was a question asked by a generalist that he ran through an AI. The response was the opposite of the right answer as there was a specific reg on point.

I also find that AI is bad at understanding the meta analysis behind cases (ie doesn’t really understand the policy and therefore has a hard time generalizing).

It is a better google but still wrong—sometimes in clear ways like the ref on point and sometimes in less obvious ways where it doesn’t understand nuance.

It's quite a mindfuck to have AI produce like 700 lines of code that work on the first try, which would cost like $500 to have a human write, but if you ask it to write a 1000 word essay it goes by in a blur that seems okay at first but if you read it with your brain on it sounds bad and wrong.

In truth if you look at the code more closely you could make it much prettier and more sensible but it all kind of works well enough that you don't care. Whereas it's really hard to make a written essay acceptable.

Hell, I've had AI give confidently wrong answers to things as straightforward as page limitations under specific local rules, which normal google would have answered just fine.

One would expect him to outline the factual circumstances of the arrest and why a warrant would be required in the first place.

No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions. I file hundreds of motions per year and exactly zero have ended in a written opinion. If I'm lucky I might get an explanation from the bench. Usually the judge doesn't say anything but that he'll take it under advisement and he signs an order prepared by counsel a week later.

No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions.

Are you talking about federal courts? It's pretty normal for federal courts to either file written opinions or to read an opinion into the record.

It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones

It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones

Just so we are clear, you are saying that it's common in federal court for judges to decide contested written motions without a formal explanation, either by way of a memorandum opinion or by reading the explanation orally into the record?

Is there any rule for which decisions come with opinions and which ones don’t?

For example, Pennsylvania Rules of Appellate Procedure § 1925:

Upon receipt of the notice of appeal, the judge who entered the order giving rise to the notice of appeal, if the reasons for the order do not already appear of record, shall within [60 days] file of record at least a brief opinion of the reasons for the order, or for the rulings or other errors complained of, or shall specify in writing the place in the record where such reasons may be found.

But that's specifically for decisions that are appealed.

Thanks for the clarification. I've read about five court opinions in my lifetime, so not very familiar with the standard structure.

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