Nevada federal judge Gloria Navarro has dismissed a lawsuit against family court judge Mari Parladé, ruling that judicial immunity applies regardless of how a ruling was produced.
The plaintiff accused Judge Parladé of delegating her judicial opinion to artificial intelligence, citing the judge reading from a prepared script during proceedings on August 15, 2023.
The plaintiff’s theory rested on the judge stumbling over a word while reading aloud, and accidentally saying “appearance of any impartiality” instead of “appearance of impropriety.”
Judge Navarro determined the federal court did not even need to examine the substance of the AI allegations, because judicial immunity would apply even if the judge relied “wholly on artificial intelligence” to issue a ruling.
Law professor Eugene Volokh flagged the decision, noting that complete AI reliance could become an issue on appeal or give rise to disciplinary proceedings, but cannot expose a judge to federal civil liability.
The four-factor judicial immunity test examines whether the act is a normal judicial function, whether events occurred in the judge’s chambers, whether the controversy centred on a pending case, and whether events arose from confrontation with the judge in an official capacity.
Nothing in that four-factor test would exclude a judge choosing to use AI from the scope of judicial immunity, even if such a choice would be professionally ill-advised.
The complaint described the stumbling over words as suggesting the judge “is not the author of the prose read aloud in court that day,” treating this as evidence of AI authorship.
However, as the ruling implicitly acknowledges, judges have read from prepared remarks for centuries and have been mangling those readings for just as long.
The complaint further characterised the misspoken phrase as “a classic, Freudian slip-of-the-tongue, A.I. style,” a description that rather undermines itself given that Freudian slips are by definition a human phenomenon.
AI systems can hallucinate text, but they would be unlikely to confuse “impropriety” and “impartiality” in the specific way a human speaker might when nervous or distracted.
This is not the first federal challenge the plaintiff, a California-licensed attorney representing himself, has mounted against those involved in his state family court proceedings.
According to Magistrate Judge Nancy Koppe’s report, the plaintiff has brought at least ten such challenges, with a record of “success in none of them.”
The case serves as a reminder that while AI use in judicial proceedings raises serious professional and ethical concerns, the remedy lies in appeals processes and disciplinary bodies rather than civil lawsuits against judges.