Upcoming Events for Spring 2025:
2025 South Carolina Society for Philosophy
Keynote Speaker: Barry Lam (University of California-Riverside) March 28-29, University Conference Center, Close Hipp 8th Floor
The South Carolina Society for Philosophy was founded to serve the interests and needs of philosophy students and professionals around the State of South Carolina. We meet once a year, generally sometime in February or March, at various universities or colleges around the state. At this yearly conference the bulk of the sessions are based on submitted papers, and we feature presentations by faculty, independent scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates from around the country. Since 1998 we have been holding joint meetings every other year with the North Carolina Philosophy Society, alternating meetings between South Carolina and North Carolina locations.
Register: Here
For info contact: Brett Sherman
Brandon Waldon (Stanford University & University of South Carolina)
"Large Language Models for Legal Interpretation? Don't TakeTheir Word for It" March 27, Petigru 217, 3:30 PM
Recent breakthroughs in statistical language modeling have impacted countless domains, including the law. Chatbot applications such as ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek – which incorporate ‘large’ neural network–based language models (LLMs) trained on vast swathes of internet text – process and generate natural language with remarkable fluency. Recently, scholars have proposed adding AI chatbot applications to the legal interpretive toolkit. These suggestions are no longer theoretical: in 2024, a U.S. judge queried LLM chatbots to interpret a disputed insurance contract and the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.
We assess this emerging practice from a technical, linguistic, and legal perspective. First, we review the design features and product development cycles of LLM-based chatbot applications, focusing on properties that may promote their misuse by legal interpreters. Next, we argue that legal practitioners run the risk of inappropriately relying on LLMs to resolve legal interpretative questions. We conclude with guidance on how such systems – and the language models which underpin them – can be responsibly employed alongside other tools to investigate legal meaning.
(Joint work with Nathan Schneider, Ethan Wilcox, Amir Zeldes, and Kevin Tobia)
For info contact:Tyke Nunez
For flyer: Click Here