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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Dats Da Joke.

I've noticed that easily half of the County-level Judges I have worked in front of, especially those that have held their seat a long time without getting called up to Circuit level, are basically glorified clerks for all the legal reasoning they can do. They oversee an assembly line where parties are being shuffled along towards a particular outcome and the Judge just pulls the lever that rubber-stamps the outcome as 'legal.'

There's some selection effect, if you were making bank in private practice no way you'd accept a Judgeship with such little power. But yeah, letting County Judges use LLMs from the bench could only improve things.

Of course, if you ever ask me to identify which half of the Judges I'm talking about, I'll clam up because those are ALSO the ones most likely to be petty and make my job more miserable.

I've noticed that easily half of the County-level Judges I have worked in front of, especially those that have held their seat a long time without getting called up to Circuit level, are basically glorified clerks for all the legal reasoning they can do.

I had to google it since I'm not familiar with FL judicial structure--your county-level judges would be magistrates where I am, and they don't have to be lawyers here. Having them use LLMs for help would probably be a shocking level of improvement. Even the felony-level judges here (what FL appears to call the Circuit judges) who do have to be lawyers would generally benefit from the assistance.