Brian L. Frye (Tulane University Law School) has posted Exercises in Jurisprudential Style on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This essay is a work of conceptual art in the form of a legal scholarship consisting of twelve essays on the subject, “What is law?,” each of which was generated by ChatGPT in the style of one of the most important English-language jurisprudes, bookended by an introduction and an epilogue.
And from the introduction:
What a drag. While form follows function, it eventually also determines function. Legal scholarship developed a uniform style in order to facilitate its use by legal professionals. If every work of legal scholarship takes an identical form, then every user of legal scholarship knows exactly where to find and use the elements they need. Once upon a time, the conventions of legal scholarship made good sense, because legal scholars produced legal scholarship primarily for the benefit of legal professionals. But those days are long past. Today, legal scholars famously produce legal scholarship primarily for the benefit of each other, in an academic gift economy focused on white elephants. And yet, the conventional form of legal scholarship has persisted. If anything, it has even further calcified, as legal scholars reify the conventions they hope will induce the law students selecting articles for publication to infer “quality.” While everyone involved professes to deplore this sorry state of affairs, they all keep eating the spinach anyway. It’s a nasty collective action problem, but a nice illustration of the truism that legal scholars know how to solve the market failures in every market, except the ones they directly control. Quel dommage.
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