Introduction Law students soon learn that the interpretation of legal texts is one of the most important things that lawyers and judges do.  In a previous Legal Theory Lexicon entry, a distinction was made between "interpretation" and "construction."  Although we could use other words to express the distinction, it expresses an important conceptual difference between two activities: (1) discovering the "meaning" of a legal text, and (2) determining the legal effect given to the text. 

Eric A. Posner (University of Chicago - Law School) & Shivam Saran (University of Chicago - Law School) have posted Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This paper replicates a judicial experiment originally conducted on 61 U.S. federal judges, this time with GPT-5 as the decision-maker. The experiment involves a choice-of-law dispute in a hypothetical automobile accident case, where three variables are manipulated: (1) whether the applicable doctrine is a rule or a standard, (2) whether the plaintiff or defendant is portrayed more sympathetically, and (3) the location of the accident, which affects the legal outcome under different states' choice-of-law rules.

Eric A. Posner (University of Chicago - Law School) & Shivam Saran (University of Chicago - Law School) have posted Silicon Formalism: Rules, Standards, and Judge AI on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This paper replicates a judicial experiment originally conducted on 61 U.S. federal judges, this time with GPT-5 as the decision-maker. The experiment involves a choice-of-law dispute in a hypothetical automobile accident case, where three variables are manipulated: (1) whether the applicable doctrine is a rule or a standard, (2) whether the plaintiff or defendant is portrayed more sympathetically, and (3) the location of the accident, which affects the legal outcome under different states' choice-of-law rules.