Ruoxi Li (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)), Sirui Han (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)), and Yi-Ke Guo (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)) have posted All About Taste: The Age of Cheap Closure in Legal AI, Law, Innovation and Technology (forthcoming 2027) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Legal judgment depends not only on explicit rules, but also on legal taste: the trained capacity to recognize whether legal work has the right institutional form. Through balance, restraint, proportion, caveat, sequencing, and tone, legal taste makes authority socially legible. That legibility now creates a distinctive vulnerability. Because legal taste appears in reproducible textual forms, generative AI can produce the signs of judgment without preserving the contestable practices that make judgment authoritative. This article calls that rule-of-law risk cheap closure: the premature substitution of acceptable legal form for the objections, uncertainties, alternatives, social context, and responsibility chains that make legal power answerable. It contributes by shifting legal AI scholarship from defective outputs to acceptably competent ones; theorizing legal taste as the interface between tacit knowledge, professional form, and authority; and connecting this account to post-training and alignment. It concludes with contestability-preserving governance across output, process, and attribution.
Highly recommended!