AI & The Law: Changing Practice, Claude Constitution, & New Rights, w/ Kevin & Alan of Scaling Laws

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guests are Kevin Frazier, Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute and Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota. Together, they host the Scaling Laws Podcast, which has become a go-to resource for tracking the impact that AI technology is beginning to have on our otherwise slowly evolving legal system.
In the first part of the conversation, we focus on how AI is affecting the legal profession. While lawyers are more insulated from change than most professions, thanks to their unique ability to write licensing laws and implement other guild-style protections, Alan is clear-eyed, noting that the practice of law is fundamentally a cognitive activity, and observing that frontier models are already better than the median lawyer, at least in terms of raw intellectual horsepower. And yet, while 70% of top law forms have already licensed tools like Harvey, Kevin says that day-to-day usage remains surprisingly low, in part because the billable-hour compensation structure disincentivizes efficiency. Some secret cyborgs are quietly using AI to outperform their peers, and firms are beginning to whisper about hiring fewer junior associates. But aggregate impact so far is limited, and whether we'll see large-scale displacement of human lawyers or a dramatic expansion of legal services provided by human AI teams remains highly uncertain. Because though it is clear that many people are underserved by the legal profession today, it is not at all clear exactly how much more legal services people would want to buy, even if prices were dramatically reduced. Later on, we zoom out to consider bigger and more speculative ideas, including what maximalist legal services might actually look like. Starting with Alan's idea of using AI to develop complete contingent contracts, which would attempt to address every possible scenario before signing. Where AI should sit relative to humans on the spectrum between strict formalism and legal realism, and how the new Claude Constitution represents a virtue ethics based approach that prioritizes contextual judgment and high-level principles over detailed rules. How AI could reshape the legislative process, including Kevin's vision for outcome-oriented law. Where we first define what we actually want new laws to do, and then use AI to run simulations before passing bills. Alan's concept of the unitary artificial executive, and the risks associated with the possibility that AI could enable granular real-time control over the entire federal bureaucracy. What new rights we as individuals should have in light of AI technology, including the right to compute, which has already been enacted in Montana, and is being considered in other states, and the right to share one's personal data, which today is often frustrated by well-intentioned but outdated privacy frameworks. What new restrictions we should place on the government, such as limits on mass surveillance of public spaces. And finally, how questions of AI sentience and welfare might become a source of social conflict as people become more and more attached to AI personas. Kevin and Alan are skilled conversationalists and serious scholars, and I think you'll agree that this episode is simultaneously educational, thought-provoking, and fun. So I encourage you to join me in subscribing to Scaling Laws to keep up with everything going on at the intersection of AI and the law. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kevin Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein. Kevin Frazier, Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute and Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law. And Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and Senior Editor at Lawfare. Together, you guys are the creators and co-hosts of the podcast Scaling Laws. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Kevin Frazier** (3:54)
Thanks for having us, Nathan. Glad to be here.

**Alan Rozenshtein** (3:55)
Thanks for having us.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:57)
Yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation. We've got a lot of ground to cover. I'm interested in just always trying to patch my blind spots on the AI landscape in my kind of AI scouting mission that I always appreciate a chance to do that.
So given the fact that you guys are both law professors and scholars and studying AI and law in the intersection of those two so deeply, I want to take the chance to kind of get a survey from you in terms of what is going on at the intersection of AI and law. I listened to your recent episode on the new Claude Constitution, and certainly that's really interesting. There's a paper that you shared with me on automated compliance, which is a phrase I had not heard before, and I think that's really a fascinating concept. And who knows what else new social contracts we might imagine, explore together as well. So maybe for starters, what's going on at the intersection of AI and law?