ContractsProf Blog – By Jeremy Telman: “In case you’ve been on a Barbieheimer binge for the last few weeks and missed it, Yonathan Arbel (below, left) and David Hoffman (below, right) have posted Generative Interpretation on SSRN, and the early reviews, e.g. here, are glowing. A new land speed record has been established in that Jeff Lipshaw has already published his review on SSRN. The thesis is that large language models (LLMs) can help us resolve the meaning of ambiguous contracts phrases. The authors start with the much-cited case arising out of flooding caused by levee breaches caused by Hurricane Katrina. The issue was whether the insurer’s exclusion for damages caused by “floods” covered floods that resulted from human negligence. The Fifth Circuit determined that it did.  It did so, say the Authors, employing “the most artisanal and articulated form of textualism available in late-stage Capitalism,” a hodge-podge of dictionaries, encyclopedias, treatises, and caselaw. That sounds bad, but the alternative, say the Authors, was “kitchen-sink contextualism,” which they say, has a foul odor. That odor is the stench of illegitimacy generated by suspicions that existing interpretive methods merely provide cover for motivated reasoning…”