Casey Rockwell (University of Arkansas at Little Rock) & Michael Conklin (Texas A&M University School of Law) have posted Forgive Me, Algorithm: Magisterium AI, The Clergy-Penitent Privilege, and The Case for a Statutory Religious AI Privilege on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The intersection of artificial intelligence and religious practice has produced an unexamined gap in U.S. evidentiary law. Magisterium AI is a chatbot trained exclusively on official Catholic Church documents and now integrated into consumer applications in more than 165 countries. It represents a new category of technology: the institutional religious AI chatbot. When users disclose personal moral and spiritual information to such a platform, no U.S. evidentiary privilege protects those communications. The clergy-penitent privilege, codified in all fifty states and grounded in the Free Exercise Clause, requires a human spiritual advisor as a party to the communication. The Third-Party Doctrine makes AI-mediated communications presumptively accessible in the discovery process. The recent federal decision in United States v. Heppner forecloses privilege claims over commercial AI platform communications. This Article argues that the resulting legal gap is both doctrinally anomalous and practically harmful. Drawing on the privilege-recognition framework of Jaffee v. Redmond and Federal Rule of Evidence 501, the canonical sigillum sacramentale under the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the Vatican’s 2025 document Antiqua et Nova, and state mandatory-reporting legislation placing pressure on traditional confessional practice, this Article proposes a novel, “Digital Seal” statutory framework. The framework is a qualified evidentiary privilege for AI platforms that are institutionally anchored within a recognized religious organization, implement defined data-minimization architecture, and are subject to canonical or equivalent ecclesiastical oversight. It is designed to be confessionally neutral and applicable across religious traditions.
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