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News & Updates

May 2026


Fellowship Update: Aparna Komarla

Aparna Komarla headshot. 2025-2026 RAILS Fellow. New Publication! Can LLMs Synthesize Court-Ready Statistical Evidence? Evaluating AI-Assisted Sentencing Bias Analysis for California Racial Justice Act Claims

RAILS Fellow Aparna Komarla has published Can LLMs Synthesize Court-Ready Statistical Evidence? Evaluating AI-Assisted Sentencing Bias Analysis for California Racial Justice Act Claims.

Access the Paper

Resentencing in California remains a complex legal challenge despite legislative reforms like the Racial Justice Act (2020), which allows defendants to challenge convictions based on statistical evidence of racial disparities in sentencing and charging. Policy implementation lags behind legislative intent, creating a 'second-chance gap' where hundreds of resentencing opportunities remain unidentified.

Redo.io, an open-source platform, processes 95,000 prison records acquired under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) and generates court-ready statistical evidence of racial bias in sentencing for prima facie and discovery motions. This paper explores the design of an LLM-powered interpretive layer that synthesizes results from statistical methods like Odds Ratio, Relative Risk, and Chi-Square Tests into cohesive narratives contextualized with confidence intervals, sample sizes, and data limitations.

This study evaluates LLM performance using both LLM-as-a-Judge framework and human statisticians. Findings suggest that AI can serve as a powerful descriptive assistant for real-time evidence generation when ethically incorporated in the analysis pipeline.

Congratulations to Aparna on this publication! Read it now.

Contact Aparna

Additional Reading

Confidentiality of AI Conversations: Protecting Self-Represented Litigants Who Use ChatGPT for Legal Advice by Anoo D. Vyas 
Duke Law & Technology Review, April 2026

This article argues that self-represented litigants should enjoy protection for opinion work-product, and further, AI responses to self-represented litigants should also be permitted to count as opinion work-product. In addition, this article proposes a discovery management protocol so courts may handle AI communications in a practicable manner.

In response to the Tennessee Supreme Court's September 16, 2025 Order calling for public comment on potential regulatory reforms to increase access to quality legal representation, an informal group of Tennessee lawyers has submitted comments supporting regulatory reforms, including UPL reform to authorize AI-assisted legal help. 

Read their comments.
Moving the Bar (Substack), April 2026


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