Patty Liu will present her General Exam "Using AI to Augment Access to Justice" on Wednesday, 5/13/26 at 1:15pm in Sherrerd Hall 306. Committee: Peter Henderson (adviser), Lydia Liu, and Manoel Horta Ribeiro Abstract: The rapid adoption of AI in legal contexts presents both opportunities and risks. For example, attorneys, judges, and pro se litigants are increasingly turning to large language models to draft briefs and conduct legal research, yet these systems hallucinate legal citations at non-negligible rates and are rarely evaluated against the realities of legal practice. My research aims to audit AI systems in high-stakes legal settings and to understand how AI can responsibly expand access to justice. To audit AI in law, we study how AI tools can help verify legal citations to alleviate the growing problem of legal hallucinations in courts. We first show that hallucination rates are not consistently declining across model generations. We also introduce a benchmark of legal brief excerpts with injected hallucinations grounded in a taxonomy of citation errors derived from real court filings and evaluate an agentic verification system on this benchmark. We find that while agentic retrieval substantially improves recall, structural barriers, particularly paywalled legal databases, limit what these verification systems can achieve. To understand how AI can expand access to justice, we conduct a qualitative study with public defenders, a population underserved by existing legal AI research. Through in-depth interviews, we develop a task-level map of public defense work and surface the ethical constraints, confidentiality risks, and organizational barriers that shape responsible AI adoption in this context. The combination of these works show that progress in legal AI requires both empirical auditing of AI systems and direct engagement with the practitioners who use them. Reading List: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uipmhQd2fgYn14u9BfNmqh-s3BBjoSollOW9X4eF... | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uipmhQd2fgYn14u9BfNmqh-s3BBjoSollOW9X4eF... ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.