Legal philosopher Matthew Kramer (Cambridge) called this article to my attention; Professor Kramer explains:
[T]here is a citation to the book LEGAL POSITIVISM: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION by Matthew H. Kramer and published by the Edinburgh University Press. The problem is that no such book exists. I have not published a book with the specified title and subtitle, nor has anyone else done so. None of my books has been published with the Edinburgh University Press.I proceeded to look up the non-existent volume on the Web, and I discovered that a request to a chatbot had been made a few months before the dissemination of the paper in which that imaginary book is cited. The request asked the chatbot for references to works on legal positivism and natural-law theories. The chatbot provided three references, including the one to the non-existent book by Matthew Kramer. The researchers at the University of Washington apparently made no effort to verify the actuality of that book, and they obviously made no effort to read it. Instead, they simply cited it for the edification of their readers.
Legal philosopher Matt Lister (Bond University) then pointed out to me that the article also cites the make-believe book, "Brian Leiter, Jurisprudence: Realism in theory and practice. Oxford University Press, 2007." My Naturalizing Jurisprudence was published by OUP in 2007, and Karl Llewellyn, whose work is discussed in my book, did write a book in 1962 called Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice. Chat GPT, as readers by now probably know, simply predicts the next word likely to follow based on its analysis of its database. (Professor Kramer, too, has written books on legal positivism, but not the make-believe book!) This is why it makes up citations, as a lawyer in New York learned the hard way. The faculty, all at the University of Washington, responsible for this should be embarrassed by their carelessness. I trust they and others will do better in the future.
Leave a Reply