Pseudolaw and generative AI

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Daily wrap  

• Erin Patterson lied to detectives — but her defence argues she's not guilty of murder - ABC News
   

• Pilot involved in fatal Ball Bay plane crash arrested after walking out of court without bail - ABC News
   

• Bruce Lehrmann picks up new job as live-in nanny for family while awaiting defamation appeal, Qld rape trial | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site for latest headlines

   

• NSW Government passes bill banning private electronic monitoring for bail | NSW Government
   

  • R v Troy Anthony Xerri - NSW Caselaw

    [17] The effect of the legislation is to prohibit the Court from allowing or permitting a condition of private electronic monitoring. There are only two possibilities that arise as a consequence of that prohibition. The first of them is that bail will be refused because the electronic monitoring is essential to ameliorating the unacceptability of the risk associated with the conditional liberty of the applicant.

    [18] Secondly, bail will be allowed without electronic monitoring. The effect of that necessarily means that, in the latter case, a protection, albeit not a guarantee but a protective condition, will not be permitted to be imposed upon persons who are thought to be a risk to society. Alternatively, the State will have to bear the cost of incarcerating the people.

    …

    [20] These are political decisions. The Court is in the situation where it is required to deal with the law as it stands and is required, subject to issues of conscience and constitutionality, to apply the law, but it has to be said the proposition and circumstances that arise as a consequence of the implementation of the amendment are quite odd.
     

• Over my dead body: Martin Sharp, Cranbrook and the $33m house [SMH paywall]

  The late, great pop artist Martin Sharp made the point in his will that he didn’t want his long-held family home sold to Cranbrook. That’s too bad.
   

  • Street of Dreams Martin Sharp Ltd v Attorney General for NSW - NSW Caselaw
     

• Angelos Angelopoulos suffers major court loss after government refuses to pay for 93yo father’s Greek Orthodox funeral | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site for latest headlines
   

  • Angelopoulos v State of Queensland [2025] QCA 83 (27 May 2025)
     

• Brian Arthur Campbell Mathers: Cook cleared of filming girl in shower wins pay claim | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site for latest headlines
   

  • Mathers v State of Queensland (Queensland Health) [2025] QIRC 134 (28 May 2025)
     

Editor’s picks

• Pareidolic Illusions of Meaning: ChatGPT, Pseudolaw and the Triumph of Form over Substance by Joe McIntyre :: SSRN

  The early 2020's has seen the rise of two strange, and potentially quite impactful social phenomena: pseudolaw (where users rely upon pseudolegal arguments that mimic the form and ritual of legal argumentation but fundamentally distort the content of law), and generative AI/LLMs (which generate content that uses probabilistic calculations to create outputs that look like human generated text). This article argues that the juxtaposition of the two phenomena helps to reveal that they both share two fundamental traits: both elevate form and appearance over substance and content, and users of both routinely mistake the form for the substance. In drawing upon legal theory, computer science, linguistics and cognitive psychology, the article argues that both phenomena rely upon creating illusions of meaning that users mistake for the underlying primary phenomenon. I then explore four implications of this conception of both phenomena: (1) in both cases rely on human tendencies of 'conceptual pareidolia' resulting in the erroneous perception of meaningful linguistic/legal patterns from nebulous inputs; (2) both rely upon the 'confidence heuristic', the human cognitive bias for treating confidence as a proxy for competence; (3) both phenomena succeed when the primary concern is with the form of the output and not its content; and (4) both phenomena rely heavily upon the magical thinking of users, and the desire for the promise of the approach to be real. It argues that the legal context helps to reveal a solution for the problems caused by both phenomena: it is only where users possess sufficient legal and technological literacy that it becomes possible to reveal to them the illusionary nature of the phenomena.
   

• Are politicians and judges constitutionally excluded from the proposed superannuation tax? - YouTube

  This video responds to a question from viewers about whether politicians and judges are constitutionally excluded from the application of the proposed Div 296 tax on superannuation balances over $3 million in Australia.
   

• A statement from The Honourable Chris Kourakis, Chief Justice of South Australia launching a survey about use of Generative AI in the South Australian courts - CAA
   

• Future 50 Series: Small Words, Big Consequences: How Prompts are Redefining Legal Practice - YouTube
   

• Locking up kids isn't tough. It just creates more adult criminals - Law Council of Australia
   

• Researchers created a chatbot to help teach a university law class – but the AI kept messing up
   

• 42. Piracy and Madness - Called to the Bar: International Law over Drinks - Apple Podcasts

  What is it about piracy that causes international lawyers to lose all common sense? This week, in a twist on our “what everyone gets wrong about...” series, Juliette McIntyre talks to Douglas Guilfoyle and Tamsin Phillipa Paige about what drives them mad in piracy scholarship. And what is the crime of piracy, really? How old is it? And where does it come from? Fasten your seatbelts for a bumpy jurisprudential ride.
   

• Ben Roberts-Smith failed submissions in his appeal case, dissected
   

• US lawyer sanctioned after caught using ChatGPT for court brief | Utah | The Guardian
   

• Judge issues injunction over Trump plan to limit Harvard enrolments - ABC News
   

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