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How Often Are Articles in Top Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?

A guest post from Julian Nyarko.

Orin S. Kerr | 9.7.2026 1:10 PM

[Orin Kerr writes: My colleague Julian Nyarko reached out to me with an interesting guest post looking into whether AI is being used to write parts of law review articles published in top journals, using estimates from Pangram's AI detection software. Professor Nyarko's basic finding, as I understand it: Most law review articles published in top journals this year have no AI writing at all, although some have a small amount of AI writing, a handful have a substantial amount, and one article was more than 50% AI-written. I reprint Professor Nyarko's post below. All that follows was written by Professor Nyarko.]

Over the last few weeks, there has been some interesting discussion around the use of AI in the writing of law review articles, with views among legal scholars varying quite widely. To me, the question of whether AI use ought to be prohibited or even just frowned upon is genuinely hard.

In my area of empirical legal studies, I believe most scholars would agree that the process of *thinking* through a project and the process of *writing* the paper, while not unrelated, are largely separate undertakings. This is because empirical analyses are often planned and executed in meticulous detail, and the main figures and tables are created before a single word of the article's narrative prose is drafted. Indeed, the increasingly prevalent practice of preregistration disincentivizes scholars from changing what is thought to be the core contribution--the empirical analysis--during the final stages of writing the paper. Granted, the originally intended framing and the interpretation of the results may undergo some changes during the drafting process. But those are also the parts of a paper that empiricists tend to read most skeptically. In fact, when reading a research article, many empirical scholars make it a point to first examine the tables, figures, and the method section, precisely because they want to get a chance to form their own views on what the data says before looking at the authors' interpretation of it.

That said, I also understand........

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