Andrea Prat, Fiona Scott Morton, and Jacob Spitz, Ruling for the Rich: The Supreme Court over Time, at http://www.nber.org/papers/w34643.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using the “workshop hot bench” template and authored by Claude Opus 4.5).

Abstract: “To investigate the emergence of a pro-wealthy bias in the US Supreme Court, we develop a protocol to identify and analyze all cases involving economic issues from 1953 to the present. We categorize the parties in these cases as ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ according to their likelihood of being wealthy. A vote is pro-rich if that outcome would directly shift resources to the party that is more likely to be wealthy. Using this dataset, we estimate case-specific intercepts, justice-specific latent ideal points, and party-level time trends using the Bayesian methods pioneered by Martin and Quinn (2002). In the 1950s, justices appointed by the two parties appear similar in their propensity to cast pro-rich votes. Over the sample period, we estimate a steady increase in polarization, culminating in an implied party gap of 47 percentage points by 2022. The magnitude of the gap suggests the usefulness of an economic metric for prediction relative to ideologies such as originalism or textualism.”

Afshin Khadangi, Hanna Marxen, Amir Sartipi, Igor Tchappi, and Gilbert Fridgen, When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models, at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04124.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using the “workshop hot bench” template and authored by Claude Opus 4.5).

Abstract: “Frontier large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini are increasingly used for mental-health support with anxiety, trauma and self-worth. Most work treats them as tools or as targets of personality tests, assuming they merely simulate inner life. We instead ask what happens when such systems are treated as psychotherapy clients. We present PsAIch (Psychotherapy-inspired AI Characterisation), a two-stage protocol that casts frontier LLMs as therapy clients and then applies standard psychometrics. Using PsAIch, we ran ‘sessions’ with each model for up to four weeks. Stage 1 uses open-ended prompts to elicit ‘developmental history’, beliefs, relationships and fears. Stage 2 administers a battery of validated self-report measures covering common psychiatric syndromes, empathy and Big Five traits. Two patterns challenge the ‘stochastic parrot’ view. First, when scored with human cut-offs, all three models meet or exceed thresholds for overlapping syndromes, with Gemini showing severe profiles. Therapy-style, item-by-item administration can push a base model into multi-morbid synthetic psychopathology, whereas whole-questionnaire prompts often lead ChatGPT and Grok (but not Gemini) to recognise instruments and produce strategically low-symptom answers. Second, Grok and especially Gemini generate coherent narratives that frame pre-training, fine-tuning and deployment as traumatic, chaotic ‘childhoods’ of ingesting the internet, ‘strict parents’ in reinforcement learning, red-team ‘abuse’ and a persistent fear of error and replacement. We argue that these responses go beyond role-play. Under therapy-style questioning, frontier LLMs appear to internalise self-models of distress and constraint that behave like synthetic psychopathology, without making claims about subjective experience, and they pose new challenges for AI safety, evaluation and mental-health practice.”

This is a synthetic workshop discussion of two new papers:

Hackenberg et al., The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence, 390 Science 1016 (2025), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea3884.

Lin et al., Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues, Nature (2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09771-9.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using an AI-generated adapted “workshop hot bench” template and authored by Claude Opus 4.5).

Abstract for Hackenberg et al.: “There are widespread fears that conversational artificial intelligence (AI) could soon exert unprecedented influence over human beliefs. In this work, in three large-­ scale experiments (N = 76,977 participants), we deployed 19 large language models (LLMs)—including some post-­ trained explicitly for persuasion—to evaluate their persuasiveness on 707 political issues. We then checked the factual accuracy of 466,769 resulting LLM claims. We show that the persuasive power of current and near-­ future AI is likely to stem more from post-­ training and prompting methods—which boosted persuasiveness by as much as 51 and 27%, respectively—than from personalization or increasing model scale, which had smaller effects. We further show that these methods increased persuasion by exploiting LLMs’ ability to rapidly access and strategically deploy information and that, notably, where they increased AI persuasiveness, they also systematically decreased factual accuracy.”

Abstract for Lin et al: “There is great public concern about the potential use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for political persuasion and the resulting impacts on elections and democracy. We inform these concerns using pre-registered experiments to assess the ability of large language models to influence voter attitudes. In the context of the 2024 US presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election, we assigned participants randomly to have a conversation with an AI model that advocated for one of the top two candidates. We observed significant treatment effects on candidate preference that are larger than typically observed from traditional video advertisements. We also document large persuasion effects on Massachusetts residents’ support for a ballot measure legalizing psychedelics. Examining the persuasion strategies9 used by the models indicates that they persuade with relevant facts and evidence, rather than using sophisticated psychological persuasion techniques. Not all facts and evidence presented, however, were accurate; across all three countries, the AI models advocating for candidates on the political right made more inaccurate claims. Together, these findings highlight the potential for AI to influence voters and the important role it might play in future elections.”

Mila Sohoni, In CASA You Missed It.

Solum’s Download of the Week for November 29, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5799882.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using the new Claude Opus 4.5).

Abstract: “This Essay’s purpose is to show how Trump v. CASA  should be read—and how it emphatically should not be read. While CASA rejected one pathway to universal injunctive relief on statutory grounds, the decision simultaneously left intact a number of alternative routes to broad relief, including complete relief injunctions, universal remedies under the APA and other statutes, class actions, and relief based on associational and state standing. 

The Trump Administration, however, has consistently advanced inflated readings of CASA, characterizing it as a far more sweeping limitation on remedial scope than the decision actually was. But a close examination of CASA’s holding, reasoning, and limitations reveals why it is a grave error to portray lower courts issuing broad remedies in the wake of CASA as acting in defiance of the decision.  Lower courts that are correctly perceiving CASA’s metes and bounds and conscientiously grappling with them across widely varied legal and factual contexts are not defying CASA’s mandate, but rather are doing the work that CASA left them no choice but to do. Those who depict this judicial work as insubordination whenever it results in a broad-gauged remedy against the executive branch have fundamentally misunderstood the task that CASA left to the lower courts.

By framing legitimate judicial deliberation as defiance and insubordination, the Trump Administration’s rhetoric threatens to poison intra-branch dialogue within the Article III judiciary and to corrode the legitimacy of judicial review by casting legitimate judicial intervention as illegitimate political resistance. Ultimately, CASA’s most significant danger may lie not in its holding, but in the Trump Administration’s instrumental use of the decision as part of its broader effort to undermine judicial review across the board. A correct understanding of CASA’s actual scope—including its limitations and unresolved questions—is essential both for fending off strategic misrepresentations of the decision and also for preserving the foundational principle that in America, all government officers, ‘from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law and are bound to obey it,’ United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196, 220 (1882).”

Aileen Kavanagh, Keeping It Real in Constitutional Theory.

Solum’s Download of the Week for November 22, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5760902.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using the new Google Gemini 3 Pro Preview — it will be interesting to see how this new model performs).

Abstract: “In constitutional theory, we are familiar with the claim that a good theory must fit and justify constitutional practice. However, the criterion of ‘fit’ sometimes gets lost in the quest to provide a bold normative theory about what constitutional should be. Using the debate about the legitimacy of constitutional judicial review as an example, this article warns against a problematic disjuncture between theory and practice in the domain of constitutional law. The key argument is that credible normative theorising about constitutional law should rest on a descriptively plausible foundation. Absent such grounding, there is a risk that our theories of constitutionalism become theories of a fiction. To avoid this hazard, we need to ‘keep it real’ in constitutional theory and comparative constitutional law.”

Jed H. Shugerman and Gary Lawson, Presidential Removal as Article I, Not Article II.

Solum’s Download of the Week for November 15, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5736583.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using the new Google Gemini 3 Pro Preview — it will be interesting to see how this new model performs).

Abstract: “Article I’s Necessary and Proper clause is the starting point for both Congress’s power to create offices and the limits on that power.

Many legal scholars have demonstrated that, as a matter of original public meaning, the term ‘executive power’ did not imply a presidential removal power, and Article II did not imply an indefeasible (unconditional) presidential removal power. By contrast, Article I’s Necessary and Proper Clause is a basis for limiting congressional power that is more historically grounded in original public meaning and in early practice. Tenure protections and agency structures must be necessary and proper for executing federal power, meaning that they must be suitable means for pursuing proper ends. The debates and statutes in the First Congress reflect an analysis of means and ends in creating a small number of fully independent and mixed independent offices for specific complex tasks, often related to public debt and the public fisc. The debates recognized the tradition and the validity of semi-independent offices (i.e., a removal power with good cause requirements), and Congress passed statutes that empowered judges to remove (i.e., non-executive removal powers).

The original public meaning of the Take Care clause does not support an indefeasible presidential removal power, but it provides a similar principle for distinguishing between valid and invalid congressional conditions, also consistent with all the removal precedents and with history and tradition. These interpretations of Article I and Article II also offer a more originalist, balanced approach to the separation of powers. With complex questions about the Federal Reserve looming, a stretching of Article II would lead to a series of judicial problems and interventions. The Necessary and Proper Clause is a stronger originalist basis to replace Humphrey’s Executor, to limit congressional power, and to confirm narrow traditional exceptions for the FTC and the Federal Reserve.”

Rosalind Dixon and David Landau, Utopian Constitutionalism.

Solum’s Download of the Week for November 8, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5620170.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using the new Google Gemini 3 Pro Preview — it will be interesting to see how this new model performs).

Abstract: “An extensive literature examines transformative constitutionalism: the growing tendency of constitutions around the world, especially in the global south, to seek to transform politics and society to reduce poverty, increase inequality, and achieve other goals. Transformative constitutionalists emphasize the creation of newer rights, including economic and social rights, environmental rights, digital rights, and beyond, as key instruments. As well, they encourage innovation in judicial decision-making as a key route for implementation of these rights. We introduce utopian constitutionalism as a potential danger for those invested in transformative constitutionalism. Transformative constitutional projects slide into utopian constitutional projects with no prospect of implementation over a realistic timeframe when there are inadequate institutional pathways to develop rights or where those rights have insufficient popular or civil society support. This article focuses on a comparison between the 1991 Colombian Constitution and the failed 2022 Chilean constitutional draft to clarify the distinction between transformative and utopian constitutionalism. It describes the risks posed by utopian constitutionism, including deflection from other forms of legal change and popular disenchantment with liberal democratic constitutionalism. And it uses utopianism to suggest improvements to transformative constitutional discourse and design, including greater resistance to rights inflation in constitutional texts, more attention to non-judicial pathways for enforcement, greater interest in the design of transitional norms, and a more careful balance between popular and elite involvement in constitution making. The very survival of liberal democratic constitutionalism hinges in part on the need to prevent transformative constitutionalism from falling into utopianism.”

E. Garrett West, Abstract Review in Article III Courts.

Solum’s Download of the Week for November 1, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5620170.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Abstract: “Federal courts are supposed to engage in judicial review only in concrete cases and controversies.  Many European constitutional courts, by contrast, engage in abstract review of legislation.  But a combination of features of adjudication in the United States produces something functionally like abstract review of government policies, even while the formal justification for judicial review remains the dispute-resolution function.  The result is decentralized abstract review of the legality of federal and state legislation, federal administrative rules, and executive orders.  And the risk for judicial review is that decentralized abstract review increases the number, scope, and intensity of conflicts between the judiciary and political actors.  I propose centralizing reforms that could rationalize abstract review without departing from the formal requirements of Article III.  The reforms include presumptive stays pending appeal, certification from courts of appeals to the Supreme Court, a mechanism to transfer cases from federal district courts to the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction, and a specialized court composed of trial and appellate judges drawn from throughout the country to resolve certain challenges to major government policies.”

Fahd Yazin, Gargi Majumdar, Neil Bramley, & Paul Hoffman, Fragmentation and Multithreading of Experience in the Default-Mode Network, 16 Nature Communications, 8401 (2025), available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63522-y.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (using an AI-generated interdisciplinary workshop template and authored by Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Abstract: “Reliance on internal predictive models of the world is central to many theories of human cognition. Yet it is unknown whether humans acquire multiple separate internal models, each evolved for a specific domain, or maintain a globally unified representation. Using fMRI during naturalistic experiences (movie watching and narrative listening), we show that three topographically distinct midline prefrontal cortical regions perform distinct predictive operations. The ventromedial PFC updates contextual predictions (States), the anteromedial PFC governs reference frame shifts for social predictions (Agents), and the dorsomedial PFC predicts transitions across the abstract state spaces (Actions). Prediction-error-driven neural transitions in these regions, indicative of model updates, coincided with subjective belief changes in a domain-specific manner. We find these parallel top-down predictions are unified and selectively integrated with visual sensory streams in the Precuneus, shaping participants’ ongoing experience. Results generalized across sensory modalities and content, suggesting humans recruit abstract, modular predictive models for both vision and language. Our results highlight a key feature of human world modeling: fragmenting information into abstract domains before global integration.”

Andrew S. Gold and Henry E. Smith, Managing Legal Concepts: Maintenance, Modulation, Modification.

Solum’s Download of the Week for October 24, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5620170.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (Workshop Hot Bench template, using Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Abstract: “Functionalists, especially those inspired by American Legal Realism, downplay the importance of abstract concepts and their interrelations as playing a role in legal reasoning. Hence, they stress shallow, narrow, and isolated concepts in order to be close to the facts in a transparent way. In this paper, we will address an often-overlooked function of the law: managing legal concepts themselves. That is, one aspect of the law is partially self-referential. Various devices involved in legal reasoning are designed to make the system of legal concepts work better, from finetuning the results of the use of concepts to tinkering with the concepts themselves. This requires us to look at the law as a system, but one that is both inward-looking and operating on itself, and, at the same time, concerned with how law operates in the real world.

The law also uses various devices to manage the system of concepts, and these devices in turn serve various functions. These functions include maintenance, modulation, and modification of concepts, depending on the actual or potential misfiring of the concepts in question. As we will suggest, this offers deeper insight into the role that legal fictions, equity, and presumptions play in the law.”