Walk into almost any corporate office, law firm, or government agency today, and you will find automated assistants drafting memos, summarizing briefs, or sorting through mountains of data. But walk into the highest court in the United States, and you get a completely different picture. Justice Samuel Alito recently made it clear that neither he nor his law clerks rely on artificial intelligence for their court work, expressing heavy skepticism that any of his colleagues on the bench are using it either.
It is a striking stance at a time when software tools are rewriting how daily business gets done. While lower courts grapple with attorneys submitting pleadings full of fictional case law generated by faulty bots, the Supreme Court is keeping its chambers firmly old school.
The Reality of Writing Opinions Without Algorithms
Drafting a Supreme Court opinion is a grueling, hyper-meticulous process. Every citation is checked, every historical precedent is weighed against current jurisprudence, and every sentence is scrutinized by multiple clerks before a draft ever reaches a justice's desk.
Why skip automated tools when they promise to speed things up? Because speed is rarely the primary bottleneck in constitutional law. The danger of a hallucinated citation or a subtle algorithmic bias slipping into a landmark ruling is a risk no prudent jurist wants to take. When a federal judge in Mississippi recently had to withdraw a temporary restraining order because a clerk used an automated search tool that produced bogus citations, it proved that the legal profession's software problem is real.
Justice Alito's comments highlight a deep institutional distrust of shortcuts. Legal reasoning requires human judgment, intuition, and an understanding of nuance that current models simply cannot replicate. If an algorithm misinterprets a centuries-old precedent, the consequences echo across the entire nation.
Lower Courts Face a Growing Mess
The contrast between the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary couldn't be sharper. Across lower district and appellate courts, judges are forced to issue standing orders demanding that attorneys explicitly certify whether any automated tools were used to draft their filings—and if so, whether a human actually verified every single word and citation.
Attorneys keep getting caught submitting briefs with nonexistent case citations because they trusted a chatbot to do legal research. Judges are losing patience, handing down hefty sanctions and public reprimands.
Yet, Chief Justice John Roberts previously acknowledged that technology is altering the landscape of litigation, noting that the judiciary has to confront these changes head-on. While administrative offices and clerks might use software for basic docket management or conflict checks, the actual intellectual heavy lifting of crafting opinions remains strictly human at the top.
What This Means for the Future of Law
You might wonder if this resistance to automation is sustainable as technology grows more advanced. The answer right now is yes, especially where accountability matters most.
When you look at how federal courts operate, human authorship is tied directly to constitutional legitimacy. Citizens expect opinions written by judges who are accountable to the law, not outputs generated by statistical prediction engines. Until automated tools can guarantee absolute factual precision and transparent reasoning, expect the nation's highest court to keep relying on human brains, heavy coffee, and classic library research.
