From the Editor

• Pages: 10184-10184
• Date: 01 May 2026
• Published date: 01 May 2026
• Author: Jay Austin
• Subject Matter: Derecho del Medio Ambiente

56 ELR 10184 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER MAY/JUNE 2026

From the Editor . . .

As this issue went to press, the literary world was reeling from a series of scandals over the reported use of AI in

published works, some of them award-winning. Publishers of novels, short stories, and even poetry are discover-

ing what we technical editors have known for a while: that the technology has gotten increasingly convincing and

harder to detect, some authors are unabashedly deploying it, and the lines between originality, assisted research,

and automated plagiarism have become difficult to police (or even define).

I don’t plan to use AI in my writing, but then this column likely isn’t the reason people subscribe to ELR. More

challenging is settling on standards for our outside submissions, which come from holdouts like me, established

scholars who are AI-curious, and digital natives who have already incorporated it into their workflow. Shifting

industry norms and reader expectations add yet another layer of complexity to this fraught debate.

For now, ELR strongly disfavors use of generative AI for drafting main body text, and will factor such use into

our decisions whether to accept a manuscript. We will require disclosure of any use of AI, including for research,

outlining, grammar, or citation-checking, and will append these disclosures to the published piece. Even as the

arguments for and against these levels of use evolve, we’ll continue to place a premium on material that makes an

original contribution to the literature and has a clear authorial voice.

In the legal world, the value of our tools ultimately depends not on how easy they make it for typists to gener-

ate words, but on those words’ usefulness—not to mention accuracy—for practitioners. That’s the promise, explicit

or implicit, our authors have always made to their readers. As a conduit between the two, ELR will do its best to

uphold that promise.

— Jay Austin, Editor-in-Chief

ELR Staff

Publisher: Jordan Diamond

Editor-in-Chief: Jay Austin

Managing Editor: Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Senior Editor: Hunter Leigh Jones

Editorial Coordinator: William J. Straub

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