Bridget C.E. Dooling (The Ohio State U) has posted “Ghostwriting the Government” (109 Marq. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Ghostwriting is when a writer prepares materials to be issued under someone else’s name. It is very common and sometimes unseemly, but why? Ghostwriting describes a politician’s use of a speechwriter, a student’s purchase of a term paper, or a tongue-twisted admirer asking a poet to craft a love letter on his behalf. It is also what happens inside organizations every day: staff draft documents for others “up the chain” to sign. Lots of people in institutions ghostwrite, but we don’t tend to call it that. We don’t call it anything, really; it’s just writing. But when legislators rely on staff and lobbyists to draft bills, when an agency head relies on staff or contractors to write a rule, and when a judge relies on her clerk for a draft opinion, the benefits of ghostwriting come into tension with the duties of government decisionmakers. This Article argues that when a government decisionmaker has a duty to reason, ghostwriting can violate that duty. A critique based on duty enhances our ability to assess governmental ghostwriting, and it comes just in time. In the quest for government efficiency, generative AI looms large. If it doesn’t matter who writes what, so long as someone “signs off” at the end, why not hand governmental drafting over to the algorithm?