Avalon Zoppo

“You have adopted a position that says the president, whoever it is at the time on January 20, can take every record within the [Executive Office of the President and] destroy it, so that the incoming president has no information about national security threats, about planned terrorist attacks, about critical negotiations in an ongoing war, critical economic negotiations for the health of this country's economy,” said Judge Patricia Millett, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“I spent much of my last few years on AI policy for the courts, and I don't intend to walk away from it,” Lyle Cayce said. “The questions courts face are changing fast, and those of us who worked through the early policies have a responsibility to share what we learned.”

The "number one [lesson] is to try to put yourself in the judges' position," Saharsky said. "The more you work on a case, the easier it is to forget what it was like when you first learned about the case and the issues. The judges and their clerks don't have that same background about the case, and they're going to come in with questions about how things work. So, it's important to be able to answer those questions and not to assume too much information because you've thought about the case for a long time."

"Given the embarrassment of the AI hallucinations and mistakes of law in the two TROs and the preliminary injunction, it would be an understandable—though obviously unjust—temptation for the judge to want to find a way to prove that, even with correct law and fact, his initial view should prevail," Judge Jerry Smith wrote for the appellate court.

"It's incredibly hard to get into the casebooks, in part because it is just like a Christmas playlist," said University of Virginia School of Law professor Mitu Gulati.

The defendant, IEC Group, in its bid for en banc review, said the plaintiffs suffered no "concrete" injury such as fraud, identity theft or out-of-pocket losses.

West Virginia's law differs from other similar state laws in that it doesn't have a notice requirement, the judges said.

The case pitted Virginia's interest in protecting kids from addictive, anxiety-inducing platforms against concern that the law prevents children from accessing non-obscene speech.

Appellate lawyers are using AI to study judges' questioning styles, test answers and sharpen their oral argument prep. But they're not ready to trade human moot courts for a chatbot.

The policies at issue bar the transfer of criminal noncitizens from state to federal custody without a judicial warrant. They also prohibit state and local officers from sharing detainee release dates with federal immigration officials.