Regulation

Weirdly, no questions about Blanche... The post A Blanche Confirmation Hearing Witness Is Getting Death Threats. Thanks, Sens. Hawley And Schmitt! appeared first on Above the Law .

If you aren’t going to study the day before the exam, what are you going to do? Read this. The post The Bar Exam Pep Talk Every Student Needs To Read appeared first on Above the Law .

The alignment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the 70--500M parameter range using reinforcement learning is often considered unstable, though the underlying failure mechanisms have not been systematically investigated. In the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) research, fifteen (model, corpus) configurations were trained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). The experiments included Pythia-70M, 160M, 410M and SmolLM2-135M, 360M on the TinyStories, CNN/DailyMail, and Wikitext-103 corpora. Three reprod

Jason Arday In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to … Continue reading Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Former Kirkland partner David Fox believes AI-powered firms could reshape the entire legal industry. The post The Lawyer Who Helped Build Kirkland Thinks AI Will Build Its Successor appeared first on Above the Law .

NBC’s new multi-cam comedy “Newlyweds” has cast three new series regulars, Variety has learned. Emma Meisel, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio and Bill O’Neill have all joined the series opposite leads Téa Leoni and Tim Daly. As previously reported, series executive producer Jamie Lee Curtis will also appear in a recurring guest star role. The logline for the […]

An FBI agent explains how the mulitnational law-enforcement Operation Cronos was successful in disrupting the largest ransomware group of its time.

The firm that once assigned associates to translate memes for the partners has become a meme. The post Makeout Video Elevates Wachtell To The Internet’s Main Character appeared first on Above the Law .

A policy statement about accuracy should, at minimum, be precise. The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Proposed Policy Statement Concerning the Suppression of Accuracy in Artificial Intelligence Systems (AI Policy Statement) struggles with that assignment. The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) submitted comments in response to the FTC’s request for input, and this post ... The FTC’s AI Accuracy Statement Needs a Fact Check The post The FTC’s AI Accuracy Statement Needs a Fact Check

Prestige works as a recruiting tool right up until the label becomes a liability. The post The DOJ (Dis)Honors Program Is Having Trouble Finding Takers appeared first on Above the Law .

We introduce Shieldstral, a 3B-parameter policy-adaptive multimodal safety classifier that matches or outperforms models nearly 7times its size on text safety benchmarks and sets a new state of the art on multimodal safety classification. Shieldstral formulates content moderation as a binary question-answering task. This simple formulation unifies diverse moderation tasks into a single yes/no problem, enabling heterogeneous safety datasets with divergent taxonomies to be consolidated under one t

Rubric-based reinforcement learning enriches language model training by evaluating model outputs against explicit criteria. Yet in GRPO-style pipelines, these structured judgments are reduced to a scalar response-level reward and converted into a response-level advantage, which is broadcast uniformly to all generated tokens. This leaves no explicit mechanism for allocating credit within a response, even when different criteria are grounded in different spans, formatting decisions, or semantic ch

On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute. We identify a teacher-student continuation asymmetry on failed prefixes, where the teacher tends to redirect while the student continues along the original direction, and con

AI can't be regulated by the invisible hand of the market. We need a comprehensive future-focused regulatory framework.

FIU continues to have an Epstein problem. The post FIU Installs Sanctioned Trump Attorney As Interim Law Dean, Overruling Its Own Search Committee appeared first on Above the Law .

Since 2017, Google has promised not to show ads based on users’ Gmail messages. While that policy isn’t changing today, Google may be laying the groundwork for personalized ads based on AI insights from users’ inboxes. Google’s support documents already acknowledge that it may show ads based on users’ interactions with AI, and with new Personal Intelligence AI features in Google Search, those interactions can now include data from Gmail. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re researching new cars.

You can thank the stars for the legal profession's newest personality test. The post This Viral Lawyer Zodiac Breakdown Is Painfully Accurate appeared first on Above the Law .

After OpenAI’s latest model broke containment and went rogue, Congress acted fast and introduced a bipartisan bill calling for the creation of an AI kill switch , which lawmakers said would ensure that the technology could not get the upper hand on humans. As written, the bill would require AI companies to be able to immediately shut down all of their advanced AI programs. The proposal has plenty of vocal proponents and opponents, but neither side appears to be paying much attention to a signifi

On-policy distillation (OPD) adapts diffusion models by querying a teacher along trajectories generated by the current student, but how it should behave under classifier-free guidance (CFG), a default component of modern diffusion systems, remains poorly understood. Existing OPD methods naturally extend velocity matching to the CFG-composed prediction, directly matching teacher and student guided velocities. We show that this objective is under-identified at the branch level: positive- and negat

Multi-turn long-horizon planning is critical for foundation model agents, yet how to fundamentally improve it remains unclear. Existing models are trained on uncontrollable and opaque Internet data, making it difficult to identify how planning ability is acquired, shaped, and integrated. To address this challenge, we introduce a unified and controlled multi-turn environment that enables precise control. It allows systematically study long-horizon planning across three stages. (1) Planning abilit

Your tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics, with University of Houston law professor Renee Knake Jefferson. The post Legal Ethics Roundup: ABA Opines Gov Lawyers Must Report Unlawful Conduct, Toronto Lawyer Suspended Over AI, Senate Bills On Judges’ Finances/FOIA & More appeared first on Above the Law .

FOIA makes strange bedfellows... The post Law And Chaos + Heritage Foundation?!?! appeared first on Above the Law .

Language model alignment aims to make model behavior reliably reflect desirable properties such as helpfulness, safety, and instruction following. Current approaches typically use supervised fine-tuning on demonstrations or reinforcement learning with rewards derived from verifiers or human feedback. These paradigms leave an important question underexplored: can demonstrations alone yield an implicit reward that can be inspected, reused, and optimized on-policy to align AI? Motivated by inverse

The first-ever case of an artificial intelligence agent going rogue coincides with the EU's major new powers to regulate AI. But Europe's leverage may be limited by the U.S.-China two-way race for AI supremacy.

Banning things people use in everyday life won’t work. The post Banning Technology: A Balk That Should Be Called appeared first on Above the Law .

Autonomous LLM agents processing mixed-confidentiality data face severe security risks from prompt injection attacks and reasoning errors. While dynamic Information Flow Control (IFC) provides structural security guarantees, traditional taint tracking permanently taints an agent's context upon reading unvetted data, severely restricting downstream utility. We present APPA (Agentic Permissions Policy Algebra), an IFC framework that resolves this usability bottleneck through engine-managed context

Large-scale video platforms process millions of uploads hourly, requiring moderation systems that can localize when and where policy violations occur within each video. Processing every frame is infeasible at scale, so systems are constrained to sparse inputs of 8 to 16 frames per video. Yet state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are pretrained on dense sequences of hundreds of frames, creating a fundamental mismatch between training and deployment conditions. This mismatch ca

Security Operations Centers increasingly rely on automated mapping of Cyber Threat Intelligence reports to MITRE ATT&CK, yet extractor outputs remain fallible and are often stored without the evidence, provenance, and validation history needed to decide whether an individual mapping should be trusted. We present TRACE- CTI, a post-extraction claim-governance framework that preserves run-level Predictions, aggregates them into configuration-level GraphAssertions, materializes setup-deduplicated c

The old tightly regulated party broadcast model is dead — for better and for worse

Maintenance regulations are complex legal texts that are difficult to exploit when addressing a specific case and challenging to integrate into operational systems. This paper presents a two-stage LLM-assisted workflow for French maintenance regulations: ontology engineering from a SEMLEG-based core ontology, followed by construction of an ontology-grounded French legal knowledge graph. The first stage consists in the open extraction of typed entities and triples from a stratified corpus sample,

Here comes more Milbank money! The post Summer Surprise: Milbank Announces Special Bonuses Up To $25K appeared first on Above the Law .

Expertise without curiosity becomes brittle. The post Marco Imperiale Is Right: Lawyers Don’t Know Their Clients Nearly As Well As They Think appeared first on Above the Law .

OneAdvanced’s tenth annual Legal Trends Report at the start of 2026 raised five key challenges for the legal sector. Now we’re halfway through the year, has there been any progress […] The post Webinar: Six months on – Are law firms making progress on their biggest challenges? appeared first on Legal IT Insider .

Mit dem Digital Omnibus wurden einige KI-Pflichten verschoben – aber längst nicht alle. Wir klären, was Nutzer von SAPs Joule sofort anpacken müssen.

International recruitment in France requires navigating a layered legal framework absent from existing legal AI benchmarks. We present a publicly available benchmark and first comparative evaluation for this domain, covering permit-type recommendation, required-document retrieval, and legal citation coverage. Comparing a parametric LLM baseline against dense retrieval augmentation at two model scales (Qwen3.5-9B and -27B) on 52 annotated synthetic profiles, we find that retrieval improves admini

Can the law tell a company that it is no longer free to destroy its own products? Among the powers traditionally associated with ownership is the freedom to determine the fate of one’s property. Whether doing so is economically sensible or environmentally responsible is another matter. However, as of 19 July 2026, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which entered into force in 2024, prohibits large companies from destroying unsold clothing, accessories and footwear, subject

Kevin M. Warsh, who has said the Federal Reserve has “no tolerance” for elevated inflation, must decide whether he wants to push for an interest-rate increase at this week’s policy meeting.

AI systems already govern. They rank speech and allocate attention, filter applicants and triage claims. The dominant frame for AI governance, alignment, asks whether such systems pursue the right objectives safely. It cannot answer a prior question: by what right are those objectives set and enforced? This Article argues that legitimacy is an autonomous regulatory objective, distinct from alignment and not secured by it. Legitimacy here is sociological: the belief among those subject to power t

Healthcare interoperability requires AI systems to produce structured outputs conforming to standardized schemas including ICD-10 for diagnostic coding, CPT for procedure billing, and HL7 FHIR for data exchange. While large language models demonstrate clinical reasoning capabilities, their integration into electronic health record systems faces a critical barrier: schema noncompliance. We evaluate three open-source models, Qwen2.5 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Gemma2 9B, via local deployment across 320