Things to Read This Week (8/10/26)
No promises for next week, but:
The Fourth Amendment After Chatrie, by Orin Kerr. A big one. Worth reading for the deconstruction of the opinion alone, but its map of possible precedential paths will likely prove very important too.
The Last Casebook Hero, by Mitu Gulati and Stephen Choi. It turns out that nobody in the next generation of judges has been able to replace Richard Posner or Frank Easterbrook as the dominant non-Justice author in law school casebooks. (The authors say that today’s ambitious judges are no longer writing for the casebooks, but given the style that too many opinions are written in, I am not sure they are right!) Finally, a personal confession. In law school I had a paranoid mistrust of casebooks and tried to do my own reading in many areas of the law. In several classes my tactic was to set up a Westlaw alert for all opinions by Posner and Easterbrook and just read whatever they wrote. Whether it worked well or not, you be the judge.
Can doctrine harness silicon law clerks? by Engel, Hermstruwer, and Kruse. Much has been written about whether precedent constrains judges. But does it constrain… AI? (Yes, argue the authors!).
Artificial Intelligence and Human Legal Reasoning, by Bednar, Cleveland, Erbsen, and Schwarcz. A lot going on here, but some data complicating some of the narratives about legal education and AI.