In 2047, Ahmad Hakim and his household are local weather refugees fleeing the Levantine Consolidation Zone after Ahmad refused to position his daughters in necessary fertility conscription. The household seeks sanctuary in CoralNet, a neighborhood ruled although “judicial meshes” combining human, AI, and nonhuman views. It’s unlikely that we’re lower than 25 years away from animals weighing in on judicial choices, however I, for one, welcome our new Orca overlords — they seem to have the right idea. Authorities deny sanctuary to Ahmad himself, whereas provisionally granting sanctuary to his spouse and youngsters, on the grounds that Ahmad refuses to permit AI copilots for himself or his kids, refuses verification literacy coaching, and rejects CoralNet’s epistemic infrastructure.
As a hypothetical, it goes lots additional on the market than your 1L Torts ultimate. That is the background for the Karl Popper Legal Reasoning Scholarship competitors, difficult regulation college students to navigate a future dominated by “synthetic intelligence, local weather change, and evolving ideas of personhood and humanism” in addition to rising international authoritarianism. Regulation college students are given an outline of the case and a physique of actual and hypothetical precedent, and requested to enter a 2000-5000 phrase submission within the type of both a celebration transient, a judicial opinion, or a scholarly evaluation.
And, consistent with an AI-driven future, college students usually are not solely allowed, however inspired to make use of AI of their submissions.
The competitors has $25,000 prize pool and is open to JD/LLB, LLM, SJD, and PhD candidates, both working solo or in groups as much as three. First prize earns $10,000, the 2 runners-up obtain $2,500 every, and 7 finalists will take dwelling $500. The deadline is October 10, 2025, 23:59 UTC.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman took to, properly, LinkedIn to express his interest in the competition:
The way forward for regulation being written by “how we combine synthetic intelligence into the foundations of justice” sounds appropriately dystopian, however the current of regulation is written by a mixture of Calvinball and “who paid for Clarence Thomas’s last vacation,” so perhaps ChatGPT ought to take a stab at it.
There’s an AI government on the market claiming his AI can substitute human judges. He is also an idiot.
However even when synthetic intelligence received’t take its place within the foundations of justice, it’s definitely going to reshape the authorized workflow. Legal professionals already use these phrase calculators the identical manner they traditionally used junior associates, to put in writing first drafts that get marked up sufficient to make Theseus wince. Judges may also make use of extra AI of their course of, even when they don’t wish to, as authorized analysis merchandise combine increasingly more AI on the backend.
AI hallucinations have embarrassed legal professionals up and down the status scale. The perfect hope for the subsequent technology of attorneys is to get them actively using the expertise early to allow them to work out what it could and can’t truly do. Regulation faculties will harbor comprehensible skittishness about turning college students unfastened on AI-assisted tasks, making competitions like this one all of the extra essential.
Past the expertise, the competitors asks an attention-grabbing philosophical query, impressed by Karl Popper himself, concerning the limits of tolerance. Popper famously warned that tolerance requires a society to be illiberal of intolerance, a well timed maxim to recollect as among the loudest calls for for “free speech” come from these preaching intolerance. How does a society steadiness open discourse with a tolerating a media panorama constructed round hijacking it for fascist ends? The perfect reply traditionally is to let the viewers converse freely themselves: to protest, to mock, and to boycott. These rights of the viewers have come beneath assault from those that wish to say that free speech is the affirmative right to be protected from criticism. This interpretation, couched within the language of freedom, was all the time a precursor to fascism as a result of its elementary logic rests on coercive authorities motion to silence opposition. So once we begin seeing FCC licenses dangled to get late-night hosts removed for making jokes, it’s only one extra step on the street to eroding the guardrails defending society from intolerance.
However, Popper’s tolerance paradox goes deeper than speech, the hypothetical asks about granting asylum to a father who espouses racist and misogynist views that conflict with the neighborhood whereas maintaining a household fleeing persecution collectively. Ought to a society search to maintain out intolerance at the price of punishing the entire household? When ought to the state sacrifice cultural pluralism to guard the person rights of the relations? Then throw the idea of compelled AI copilots onto all this.
It’s a captivating competitors. Read more about it here. And keep in mind, you may have till October 10, 2025, 23:59 UTC to enter.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Regulation and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Be happy to email any ideas, questions, or feedback. Comply with him on Twitter or Bluesky in case you’re concerned about regulation, politics, and a wholesome dose of faculty sports activities information. Joe additionally serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
