The Volokh Conspiracy

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

About The Volokh Conspiracy Editorial Independence Who we are Books Volokh Daily Email Archives Search DMCA RSS

What To Do With AI-Generated Legal Scholarship?: Part 2

Am I an author? A prompter? Is this mine?

Orin S. Kerr | 4.27.2026 1:54 AM

As I explained in my previous post, I recently tasked AI with comparing two transcripts of the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr.  My ultimate question is, what do I do with the document that resulted?  And that breaks down into two sub-parts.  First, do I publish this, either just online informally or with some kind of journal?  And second, how do I describe what my relationship is to it?  Am I a co-author?  The author?  Just a prompter?

Let me start by explaining how the memo was created, and then turn to the questions I have.

I. How the AI Memo Was Created

I need to start with what I did to help create the memo, as that might be relevant to my questions.  The transcripts that needed to be compared were .pdfs of two-volume books from 1807 and 1808 that go for hundreds of pages, although the only parts I cared about were the parts on the privilege against self-incrimination. I used Claude (Opus 4.6 extended),  and I tasked it with comparing the discussions of the legal arguments about the privilege against self-incriminagtion to get a better sense of whether my 2021 article on those arguments based on the Robertson transcript was accurate in light of the Carpenter transcript.

To say that "I tasked Claude" covers up a lot of detail, though.  I went through around 30 rounds of prompting with Claude, over the course of a few hours.  As I went along, I learned about what Claude could and couldn't do and pushed it to do a better job when it was resistant to do more.  For example, when I first asked Claude to compare the documents, it declined, saying it was just too big a task to take the two long pdfs, to make them readable, and then to compare them.  So I started with an easier task: Take my 2021 article, read it, and understand what it claims about the Burr trial, and then read the Carpenter transcript and write an article presenting a comparison.   The first draft reply was a start, and made me think that the enterprise might be ultimately useful.  But it left a lot to be desired.

Over time, I came to realize that there was an art to getting Claude to make the comparisons I needed.  Ultimately it agreed to do a direct comparison of the two transcripts based on the claims I had made in my 2021 article.  And I........

© Reason.com