Abbe R. Gluck Appointed to NYC Bar Presidential Task Force on AI and Digital Technologies as Co-Chair for Access to Justice

Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy Abbe R. Gluck ’00 has been appointed as the Co-Chair of the Subcommittee on Access to Justice as part of the New York City Bar Association’s recently unveiled Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies.

“With law being where ethics and morality interact with the regulation of human conduct, and with the potent impact AI is bringing across society with both great promise and great peril, it is incumbent on organizations like ours to facilitate discussion about these issues among thought leaders, lawyers, scientists, technologists, academics, business leaders, ethicists, citizens and policymakers,” said Muhammad U. Faridi, President of the New York City Bar. 

Previously the City Bar had created a Working Group on Cryptocurrencies in 2021, succeeded the year after by the City Bar’s Task Force on Digital Technologies. The newly launched Presidential Task Force will incorporate and expand upon such previous work with the efforts of its committee members, whose collective expertise draws from across academia, computer science, industry, business and nonprofit leadership, government, and law.

Gluck, who has been a vocal proponent for a subcommittee devoted to the intersection of AI with unrepresented and underrepresented litigants and the legal organizations that support them, will co-lead the newly announced Subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence and Access to Justice with McGregor Smyth ’99, Executive Director of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. Other members of the Subcommittee include Raymond Brescia ’92 (The Hon. Harold R. Tyler Chair in Law and Technology and Professor of Law at Albany Law School), Rodrigo Camarena (Director of the Justicia Lab), Katherine Forrest (Partner at Paul, Weiss and former U.S. District Court Judge, Southern District of New York), and Rich Leimsider (Independent Nonprofit Consultant and Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the Fund for the City of New York).

“I am so grateful to the City Bar's leadership for recognizing that now is the time to focus on the effects of AI on unrepresented and underrepresented litigants,” Gluck said. “These groups, and access to justice concerns, too often are an afterthought, rather than being included in these kinds of conversations at the outset of technological change.”

The Subcommittee will focus on “the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence for unrepresented parties and nonprofit and legal services organizations that assist or represent unrepresented parties,” according to an announcement from the City Bar. Its scope additionally aims to examine “the cost of artificial intelligence tools and how those costs might affect access to justice; and the potential of artificial intelligence to deepen existing disparities in access to justice.” 

Gluck’s previous work in civil procedure has focused on issues concerning access to justice and disparities across litigants, qualifying her for this role. Among her most recent work are pioneering studies on the topics of multidistrict litigation in state and federal courts; the inequalities produced by unpublished judicial opinions; and foundational work on gun violence and the opioid crisis in state and federal courts. An expert in the field, she is chair emerita of Section on Legislation and the Law of the Political Process for the Association of American Law Schools.

In addition to her positions at the Law School, Gluck serves as Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine) at Yale School of Medicine, a Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, and founding faculty director of the Yale Medical-Legal Partnership. From November 2020 until November 2021, she served in the Biden Administration as Special Counsel to the President. In that capacity, Gluck was the lead lawyer for the White House COVID-19 Response, first for the Biden-Harris Transition and then in the White House, as Special Counsel to the White House COVID-19 Response Team. Gluck also simultaneously served as a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, where she was additionally responsible for litigation and policy relating to health care, USDA, and Veterans Affairs across the administration.

Her books include COVID-19 and Law: Disruption, Impacts, Legacy (with Cohen et al., 2023), The Trillion Dollar Revolution: How the Affordable Care Act Transformed Politics, Law, and Health Care in America (with Zeke Emanuel, 2020), and A New Deal For Cancer: Lessons from a 50 Year War (with Charles Fuchs, 2021). Gluck’s scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and many other journals.