In the last month I have received four letters containing references and quotes from court decisions and statutes that were strongly opposed to positions I was taking that I was certain were correct. I work under the assumption that there is no certainty in anything we do or positions we take because at any moment a Judge somewhere could take a position that is contrary to what we think is the law. Moreover, one of the wonders of Common Law is its flexibility. I am well aware of the ability of Judges to reject a time honored statutory interpretation or legislatures who demand transparency from private institutions or, to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, pass it and we will see what it provides. But this is not about human Judges reversing or distinguishing older decisions or legislatures changing statutory law, but a nonhuman source intervening to "make law."

The first letter I received in this brave new world, cited a federal statute from the 1970s that I knew to take a contrary view but the decision specified that it was a New York statute from a decade later. I then looked for the New York decision based on the citation, the name of the decision and the court's records, and the cited decision did not exist. Think about it. A New York State Supreme Court decision with citations interpreting a New York State statute with a name almost identical to a federal statute. In the last sentence the only aspect that was true was the federal statute. Later that week I was meeting with the head of AI at a medical center on whose council I sit and I asked her about what I found and was told that it was likely an "AI Hallucination, which is not an uncommon manifestation from AI systems."