By Julius Melnitzer | May 12, 2025
“GENDER RECOGNITION CERTIFICATE” DOES NOT A “WOMAN” MAKE
The United Kingdom Supreme Court has ruled that “woman” in the Equality Act (EA) means a biological woman. The ruling strikes down guidance from the Scottish government stating that a gender recognition certificate issued to an individual brings that person within the EA’s definition of “woman”. The unanimous court concluded that the words “sex”, “woman,” and “man” mean and were always intended to mean biological sex, biological woman and biological man and could not “properly be interpreted…to include certificated sex without rendering them incoherent and unworkable”. Still, the court emphasized that its conclusion did not “remove or diminish” the EA’s protections for trans people.
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DO LAW SOCIETIES HAVE THE POWER TO PROMOTE “WOKENESS”?
That’s the issue raised by lawyer Roger Song’s constitutional challenge to several Law Society of Alberta (LSA) rules on the basis that they unlawfully promote a broader political agenda. The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is providing lawyers to argue Song’s case. They will argue that certain LSA rules improperly impose a range of politicized requirements; redefine legal competence as adherence to woke political beliefs; redefine legal ethics and suppress dissent; and are so vague that they can’t be navigated without adopting an approved ideological framework.
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GARFIELD LAW: WORLD’S FIRST AI LAW FIRM
The UK’s Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has authorized its first law firm providing legal services through artificial intelligence (AI). The Law Society Gazette notes that the announcement “echoes of those hailing the first alternative business structures a dozen years ago”, the SRA approved Garfield Law, co-founded by a lawyer and a quantum physicist. The five-employee startup specializes in small claims debt recovery and, according to co-founder Philip Young, features an enterprise-grade large language model that “can handle the entirety of a small-claim track debt claim”. Even if the claim goes to court, Young maintains, the system “can do everything apart from conducting oral arguments”.
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DEAD VICTIM HAUNTS KILLER IN COURTROOM AI VIDEO
When writer’s block hit Stacey Wales, who was struggling to formulate a victim impact statement for the sentencing of the man who killed her brother in a road rage incident in Chandler, Arizona, she decided to let her brother speak for himself. Using artificial intelligence, she generated a video of her late brother, Christopher Pelkey, speaking to his killer and played it in court. According to Practice Source, this is the first time AI has been used in this way in the US.
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TRAINING AI ON COPYRIGHTED WORK IS NOT “FAIR USE”
In one of the first cases on using copyrighted text to train AI, a Delaware District Court has ruled that Ross Intelligence, a legal research startup, infringed Thomson Reuters’ (TR) copyrights when it accessed Westlaw headnotes to train its artificial intelligence model. Ross had approached TR to license its data, but when TR refused, Ross hired a third party to create summaries based on the headnotes, which Ross then used to train its AI. The court rejected Ross’s argument that its actions constituted “fair use” because the use was commercial, non-transformative and harmed TR’s potential markets.
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