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The across the board tariffs are back already, under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. And the per-country tariffs are on their way back. Trump really has learned from his opposition. Just drag out unfavorable decisions, then make a small change and start the process all over again.
This would still leave him with having to pay back some 200 billion dollars, I think.
And nobody would assume that SCOTUS would let get Trump away with his next harebrained tariff scheme, so the money companies pay in tariffs might just be considered a credit extended to the US.
No, since SCOTUS didn't say the money had to be refunded, that'll be ANOTHER court case. And he'll probably claim the new tariffs are retroactive, which will be yet another case.
All commentators seem to agree the Section 122 tariffs are on solid ground for at least 150 days. After that, Congress has to approve to renew... but Trump could just declare another emergency if they're not, and if anyone objects... well, it's ANOTHER court case.
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It's the Star Wars meme.
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It would be... silly to assume that these situations weren't gamed out WELL in advance.
It wouldn't even require coordinating with any of the Justices. Just have three backup plans ready to go, open the appropriate box based on what the decision says.
An LLM could write up a viable alternative with <10 minutes of prompting too, once fed the opinion.
Welcome to the future, kids.
Actually that hits on another thing that's been nagging at me.
I don't think our Justice system is AT ALLLLLLLLLL prepared for handling a deluge of litigation fueled by savvy (key point) attorneys who use LLMs to craft aggressive motions, and draft clever briefs in support, and then if they lose on appeal, find gaps in the decision to keep on doing the thing they wanted to do, but with a different underlying justification.
Supreme Court took a year to make one ruling on the Tariff issue. The Administration hops through the gaps left in said decision. If it takes another year for any other case to reach them, the Admin will presumably hop through the gaps in the next decision too.
I will bring up an old suggestion I've made before: Train up 9 LLMs on the writings of the most famous SCOTUS Justices in our history, selecting for some ideological diversity... then let them rule on cases.
It is unclear to me how the existence of LLMs creates or exacerbates this problem when,
a) the current amount of legal writing vastly exceeds the amount which will ever be appealed, and probably exceeds by one hundredfold the amount which will ever reach the Supreme Court
b) lawyers already have a tremendous amount of incentive to find and close/open gaps in arguments or decisions, and draft clever briefs
c) there is an upper limit to how clever or insightful a slurry of writing can be, given that it still has to be relatable to the people reading it (unless you're venturing far into Sapir-Whorf theory) and grounded in their ideas or principles. I am not skeptical that in (3/5/10/40) years a good LLM or similar machine will be able to, for example, take 20 terabytes of code or data and do brilliant and useful and efficient things to it - but I don't think there are 25 legitimate and continually-deepening modes of analyzing the effect the 1973 fisheries act has on some relevant constitutional or administrative law/principle that would require responses by the SC.
Yes, this is why SCOTUS has a ton of informal and formal criteria for selecting which cases are worth their time to hear.
But it seems obvious to me that there was a hard bottleneck on how quickly litigants can react to new caselaw and that Courts intentionally avoid making drastic rulings that cause sweeping changes so any given court decision is going to have gaps in it which they will likewise be slow to 'plug.'
I suspect now its as easy as "read this Appellate decision and find me six possible loopholes or procedural methods to delay its implementation to achieve my client's goals, make sure to check the entire corpus of Law Journal Articles for creative arguments or possible alternative interpretations of existing law. Make no mistakes."
(and I'm leaving aside the issue of JUDGES using LLMs to find and create bases for favorable rulings)
There gonna start just one strike your out disbarment for LLM usage they really don’t have a choice for a lot of reasons
I could imagine adding CivPro rules that discourage wanton LLM use. I don't see how they effectively enforce them.
hallucination appears in your brief = disbarment
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I don't know that this is a big improvement over Westlaw, at the societal level. At the level of an individual lawyer, maybe, but bigshot appellate firms have a lot of legal hours to noodle on these problems and clients who will pay for those hours.
And my impression is litigants react to changes in caselaw very quickly. If SCOTUS makes a major decision, interested litigators will move very rapidly to bring cases under that new decision. Look at how many shots gun rights groups have taken at SCOTUS recently.
I don't disagree with this overall, but I want to make it clear that I think they'll be even faster.
Bruen was handed down in 2022 and it took a couple years for states to get really creative rules and rulings on the books... and of course SCOTUS has been agonizingly slow to address these matters.
I'm suggesting that in this new world, SCOTUS could hand down a decision, and by the next week various state legislatures could be passing bills that are competently written specifically to thwart/loophole those decisions.
So my definition of "reacts very quickly" assumes speedier action due to LLM assistance.
Are you sure this hasn't already happened? Trigger laws already exist, which accomplish the same thing in substance.
Either way, it seems to me that the bottleneck now is mostly the legislative schedule and the court's hearing schedule. If legislatures and courts use LLMs to speed things up (far-out now but not impossible), I could see real gains being made to the speed there the entire cycle.
I guess the logical end-point of this is multi-agent negotiation between the LLM representatives of the state, the legislature, the courts, and various interest groups, all negotiating, passing, and striking down new laws millions of times a year. Humans might not notice this, of course, since at this point the laws might mostly bind the LLMs...
(Hope this isn't a repost, looks like my first comment got eaten by the cyber gremlins!)
I don't think this will be the actual end-point in a permanent sense, but yeah, this might be where we land for the next decade or so.
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In a society as litigious as the US, the slowness of the courts is effectively an Omnicausal problem at this point. Not just in taking a year to decide on tariffs for the SC, but even state and local courts are swamped.
Why do more than 95% of criminal cases end up in plea bargains? Because the court simply can not handle actually taking them to trial unless you wanted a trial set long after everyone involved is dead. And plea bargains suck, they punish innocents (who can't afford to wait the absurd amount of time for an actual trial) and let guilty criminals get away with lesser punishments (because the terms have to be really generous compared to what a trial sentence may end up in). Seriously look at almost any case where someone got off absurdly light for a crime and you'll also notice that they almost always pled guilty in it because again, over 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain of some kind.
The clogging up of immigration courts is one major part of the crisis we had, asylum applicants could take years an average of four for a case to be resolved. Keeping them locked up for that whole time is wasteful and inhumane, but letting them out creates an obvious exploit.
How about other issues like say, a landlord wanting to evict a bad tenant? A hearing in some of the busier counties could take you a few months. Want to build an energy transmission line? Have fun spending more than a decade on various legal challenges. You might be a parent unable to see your child for more than a year because of custody disputes being unsettled.
This ain't just a US problem either, Canada and the UK apparently have it even worse with the backlogs in some areas. It didn't use to be this bad so clearly it's possible for a functional court system to actually go at a timely manner, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing this issue and how to fix it.
IANAL but it seems to me that a big part of the problem comes from common law resting on case law and therefore requiring that complex cases are ground out to a satisfactory conclusion. There seems to be no concept of ‘it would take a year to solve this complex case and all the claims and counter claims but you’ve got a week so do whatever you can’.
Also it feels that the nature of case law means that over any reasonable amount of time there will naturally be erosion of the original intent.
Which due to sheer population, judge polarization and information sharing circa today is going faster and faster
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It could genuinely be fixed (in the short term) by spending a LOT more money on the court system to get competent judges, clerks, assistants to process cases in a timely fashion, update systems to modern tech to increase throughput, and Marshall necessary resources to enforce the court's rulings too.
But Courts are inherently a cost center for any government. Indeed, in Florida, the statutory trend is to draft laws to discourage litigation at every turn. Requiring extra procedural hoops before filing is permitted, forcing pre-suit negotiations or even mediation, and now they're starting to restrict the ability to collect attorney's fees.
No government that I know of actively expands its judicial resources to scale with its economy or population.
There are some issues that have to funnel through the courts (Probate, the disposition of a dead person's stuff, being one of them), but beyond that, in their function as dispute resolver can still 'work' by making the process as ardurous and unpleasant as necessary for the parties to consider cooperation the strictly superior option.
My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."
And if the other party finds this credible, the incentive for solving things cooperatively become obvious.
Didn't the Qing make a law that reporting a crime to the police, where the accused was found not guilty, would be punished more severely than the actual crime, so as to discourage undue involvement of the legal system in people's affairs? Or am I remembering wrong?
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I don't know that LLMs really could add much since any lawyer would be able to give you a ballpark on likelihood of success and the award range. The thing with civil litigation is that discovery can take time, and high value cases with good evidence will always be given priority. For the trial docket I work off of, a case can go from filing to trial in under a year, and most cases don't take much longer. And this is a relatively complex type of litigation where that's already pushing it as far as having enough time to develop the case is concerned. But cases that are if lower value or have evidentiary issues can take a decade to resolve, not through any fault of the court but because the attorney responsible isn't motivated to list them for trial until the ducks are all in a row.
I mean, I'd just point out that this answers your initial thought:
Any lawyer can give you the ballpark, but the LLM now makes it 'viable' to file and prosecute a suit as long as it is expected to be barely EV positive.
The cost of getting 'all ducks in a row' should go down substantially.
By getting all your ducks in a row I'm not referring to anything that an LLM can accomplish. I'm referring to things like making sure you have witnesses lined up for deposition and things of that nature, since you don't want to wait until the start of discovery before looking for them. This is mostly and issue in wrongful death cases, where you can't just depose the plaintiff to get the evidence and often need to track down third parties. Whether or not you can get a case off the trial list after discovery closes depends on the custom of the attorneys in the area in which you're practicing. There's one firm I deal with a lot that has a habit of listing cases they don't do anything with and having them removed (some trial terms my caseload is disproportionately made up of these perennials that never seem to go off, including one from 2013 with a crazy plaintiff who refuses to settle anything and whose attorney keeps listing it and removing it to keep the guy happy, or so I assume); I never oppose these motions, because I (and my clients) prefer to maintain a good working relationship with the firm over forcing the issue to get a single case dismissed. Other practice areas aren't so cordial and laid back, and plaintiff's attorneys aren't going to list cases unless they're sure they'll actually go off.
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As I understand it a lot of commercial / divorce / etc outcomes are already predictable and it doesn’t make people less litigious.
SORT OF.
In the more emotionally-driven areas (so yeah, outside of commercial), like divorce and contested probate, sometimes people genuinely just want to inflict the process as a punishment on the other side... and sometimes emotions flip and what looked like a surefire drawn-out fight gets resolved in a weekend.
Lawyers are still bound to do what their clients want, after all. But if a lawyer can pull up their AI Case Analyzer and say "Look, its not just my opinion, the Computer is telling you that even if we drag this out for two years your best outcome is an additional 10-15k over the offer that's on the table now" maybe we avoid some conflict.
(one can hope that clients can see reason, this might be a fool's bet)
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It will be interesting to see if people view the LLM as more authoritative, though. Lawyers will take losing cases if they are going to be paid for them.
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Especially at the smaller scale where there's a ton of emotive considerations and people are infrequently engaged with the legal system.
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I don't think justice systems in general are ready for this. Indeed, they're already vulnerable to this now, and they depend on other social institutions to carry out their will (just as they always have done- courts don't actually have legions).
That said, what prejudice (and the dismissal thereupon) is also happens to be defined by the court. As is who even takes appeals.
[At least it's an argument for having fewer laws- but then, that might not be advantageous since "just ban everything and never hear any appeals because fuck you lolol" is already what happens most of the time in 2A cases and doesn't even require dismissing cases like that.]
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