Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

Imagine you are in a high-stakes competition—perhaps a game of chess or a professional sports match. You’ve trained for years and you know the rules by heart. But as the match begins, you realize something unsettling: your opponent has a playbook you’ve never seen. In fact, they have a library of thousands of past matches that you aren't allowed to look at. They can cite these past moves to the referee to win the game, while you are left guessing in the dark. For decades, this wasn’t a metaphor; it was the reality for immigration lawyers in the United States. Every year, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) issues tens of thousands of decisions. Most of them are "unpublished," meaning they aren't printed in the official law books. But the government’s lawyers had them. They could search them, find the ones that helped their case, and use them against immigrants who had no way of seeing the "secret law" being used against them. In 2021, a group of legal ai...