American Law Institute Leaders Discusses the Need to Address AI and Other Emerging Legal Challenges

Oct. 8, 2026 – Civil court dockets are expected to increase by about 30% this year due to a significant wave of filings generated by artificial intelligence programs, Texas Supreme Court Justice Brent Busby told an audience at the University of Houston Law Center recently.

“The reason for that is the access to justice crisis we have in this country,” he said, adding that up to 90% of low- and middle-income people aren’t well served by the court system.

“All these AI filings are from people who can’t afford traditional (legal) representation,” he said. “Unfortunately, chat GPT is not a great tool for that. We need to address it.”

Busby joined American Law Institute President Wallace B. Jefferson, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, and Lee Rosenthal, senior U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Texas, for a wide-ranging conversation about how the law is responding to emerging challenges and ALI’s efforts to clarify and modernize the law and its impact on the legal profession.

The event drew law students, lawyers and judges, including a number of institute members.

AI and a Changing Legal Landscape

Busby serves as an advisor on ALI’s ongoing High-Volume Civil Adjudication project, which addresses claims including eviction, debt collection, child support and home foreclosures, where the high number of cases stresses courts and where many of the AI-generated filings are found.

Jefferson said the law also must grapple with other AI-related issues, including how the tort system should deal with liability in AI cases, including damages involving driverless cars.

“Who is liable?” he asked. “How does the court system adapt to this new era?”

Those questions reflect the ALI’s mission for more than a century: bringing greater clarity and consistency to the law.

“The founders [of ALI] looked at the chaos in the legal system because we had different jurisdictions that had different systems of law,” Jefferson said.

Today, ALI continues to develop legal principles aimed at helping courts, legislatures and agencies navigate areas ranging from criminal law to property law, contracts, foreign relations, high-volume civil litigation and AI.

Finding Consensus

ALI’s work often involves a lot of time and debate. Jefferson described the effort to bring order to laws across jurisdictions and decades as a labor of love for the legal profession. The speakers also said the process is an example of sustained civil discourse and consensus building among a diverse group of participants who often begin in stark disagreement.

“We do this with absolutely no partisan slant,” Rosenthal said. “We have a fierce commitment to independence from partisan politics, driven by where the inquiry takes us.”

“It is open discourse on an intellectual high level, a civil level. And we come out of it not only agreeing but converging on points that the majority can accept.”

All 4,000 elected members of ALI are eligible to vote on the final draft.

Jefferson cited ALI’s work on the Model Penal Code as critical, noting that criminal law at ALI’s founding in 1923 varied widely from state to state. Work on laws dealing with sexual assault highlight the complexity the organization often deals with.

That took more than a decade, said Rosenthal, who led discussions throughout the process. “When the Model Penal Code was first produced by ALI in the earlier part of the 1900s, it introduced principles that were, by the standards of the day, enlightened,” he added.

Times change, however, and the original work did not acknowledge a growing consensus about aspects of the crime, she said, including spousal rape and same-sex rape.

Revising the code wasn’t easy. “The provisions of sexual assault turned out to be a buzz saw,” she said.

Women’s advocacy groups raised concerns about the history of the legal system discounting women’s perspectives, leading to underplaying and underreporting of sexual crimes. Civil rights advocates were leery of a system that for centuries had racialized sexual assault, including stereotypes of black men raping white women.

“But at the end of the day, we produced a draft that the membership voted to accept,” Rosenthal said.

A Resource

It is a complicated issue, but Jefferson said that is the point.

“What I’m most proud of (is), what we’re dealing with is hard. There are no easy answers,” he said. “What we produce is not the law. It is our best attempt to clarify and modernize it, and the courts can adopt or not adopt it, the legislatures can pass statutes that adopt it or not, but we’ve come up with compromises. What begins in the first draft is nowhere near the final proof in the end.”

That is precisely why documents prepared by the American Law Institute can be useful for sitting judges, Busby said, allowing them to understand a topic in a balanced way before ruling.

“It’s a wonderful resource for judges,” he said. “It’s useful when you need some context. It surveys what courts have done, what commentators have done.”

Rosenthal also announced that the 2027 annual meeting will be held May 16-19 in Houston.