Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage Policy

Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to support activities such as language improvement, literature organization, idea development, legal-document organization, preliminary source discovery, data exploration, or manuscript preparation. AI tools must not replace the authors' critical thinking, legal reasoning, interpretation of authorities, doctrinal analysis, comparative assessment, methodological judgment, or original scholarly contribution.

Authors are responsible for:

• verifying every legal citation, case, statute, regulation, treaty, quotation, and scholarly reference generated or suggested by AI;
• reviewing and substantially editing AI-assisted content;
• checking for fabricated cases, nonexistent statutes, false quotations, hallucinated citations, jurisdictional errors, bias, or misleading legal interpretations;
• independently verifying the currency and authoritative status of legal sources;
• protecting confidential, privileged, personal, copyrighted, proprietary, sealed, and unpublished information; and
• ensuring that the final manuscript represents the authors' own legal reasoning and scholarly work.

Meaningful use of generative AI in manuscript preparation, legal-document analysis, coding of judicial decisions, comparative analysis, empirical legal research, literature synthesis, data analysis, or other research activities must be disclosed in a separate AI Declaration. The declaration should identify the tool or model used, its purpose, the tasks performed, and the extent of human review, source verification, and scholarly oversight.

Basic spelling, grammar, punctuation, or conventional language editing does not normally require disclosure. If AI forms part of the research method, legal-text classification, document analysis, case coding, predictive legal analysis, empirical research, data processing, or statistical analysis, its use must be described in sufficient technical detail in the Methods section.

AI tools, chatbots, autonomous systems, and language models must not be listed as authors or co-authors. Authorship requires human responsibility for the integrity of the work, approval of the final manuscript, accountability for legal and scholarly content, and the ability to respond to questions regarding the research, sources, authorities, legal reasoning, methodology, analysis, and conclusions.

Generative AI must not be used to create, manipulate, obscure, remove, or introduce features in documentary evidence, scanned legal records, court documents, signatures, official forms, case materials, screenshots, figures, charts, or other visual material submitted as research evidence in a manner that misrepresents the underlying source.

AI-assisted enhancement must not alter the substantive content, evidentiary meaning, legal context, authenticity, or interpretation of the original material.

An exception may apply when AI-assisted image analysis, document recognition, natural-language processing, synthetic-data generation, or other computational technology is part of the research design or methodology. In such cases, authors must describe the tool, model/version, procedure, validation method, source material, safeguards, and its role in generating or interpreting research data in the Methods section.

Submitted manuscripts are confidential documents. Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, manuscript excerpts, unpublished legal arguments, confidential case materials, privileged information, datasets, supplementary files, or review reports into public generative AI systems.

Peer review is a human scholarly responsibility. AI tools must not be used to generate legal assessments, independently evaluate doctrinal validity, determine the quality of legal reasoning, verify manuscript merit without human review, or produce review recommendations. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the accuracy, fairness, confidentiality, independence, and integrity of their reports.

Editors must not upload submitted manuscripts, confidential correspondence, reviewer reports, unpublished legal analyses, privileged information, confidential case materials, or editorial decision letters into public generative AI systems.

AI must not replace human editorial judgment or be used to determine acceptance, revision, or rejection. Editors remain fully responsible for scholarly evaluation, legal relevance, source reliability, methodological assessment, ethical review, confidentiality, communication, and final publication decisions.