One of the benefits of being an academic invested in historical work is that I often think about causality and time. This week, I had a colleague question whether legal writing is inherently mechanical, a logical progression from point A to point B. Something easily replicated by a machine taught the steps so well they can even think of new steps until they become a master chess player. No, a tenured professor.

But we have also seen these arguments before. In 1974, Marc Galanter and David Trubek wrote about a crisis in law and development studies; their aim was to critique early development aid work that failed to recognise that a legal system is an integrated purposive entity that ‘draws on the power of the state but disciplines that power by its own autonomous and internally derived norms’ (1072). When US development aid agencies travelled to the so-called Third World to transplant their model of law in society and conceptions of development, they did so on the assumption that a strengthened legal profession would foster development. Build the legal services, and development would come. Build legal education, and it would, in turn, foster a system of governance by universal, purposive rules, which would contribute to liberty, equality, participation, and rationality (1076). But these aid agencies were quickly proven wrong.

As Galanter and Trubek explained, liberal legalists took many things for granted. Liberal legal reformers failed to consider context and what each individual society needed to achieve goals of greater equality and participation for coordinated social action. From Ngaire Woods to Kevin Davis, development scholars have shown how universalistic claims rarely hold up in practice when they fail to accommodate variations across time, ethnicity, nationality, or geography; across complex societies and their complex legal problems. Modernisation and nation-building may seem linear on paper, but historical practice shows they require significant elements of adaptation and creativity.

I think we may need to be clearer about why legal research goes beyond connecting the dots; of assembling the rulings of judges and scholars’ conclusions into a tapestry of reapplication. I think the academy is extraordinarily creative. We write with our passion, our frustration with injustice and, yes, sometimes our smugness in pointing out others’ mistakes. But there is feeling and consideration that go beyond memorisation and the application of law to fact patterns. Anyone reading exam answers right now may understand what I mean.

Extending this logic, if researchers abandon creativity and producing research, then what will fuel future LLMs? Will they continue to reconstitute existing work in endless patterns until the legal system completely changes -- or stops? Are LLMs our generation’s steroids, risking the elimination of sports competition? Yet, for many, steroids also alleviate rheumatoid arthritic pain, so we could analogise caution in not abandoning the good with the bad. Realising the limits of these systems does not warrant their abandonment, nor does it demand abandoning the harder work of grappling with the normativity of law.