'Judgment' Is Not Defined in Any Code of Professional Conduct

“Judgment” does not appear in the glossary of the rules that govern the legal profession.

Not in the U.S. Model Rules, not in the Spanish Estatuto General de la Abogacía, not in the codes of professional conduct of most bar associations we have reviewed. The same bodies of rules that define with surgical precision terms like “informed consent,” “knowledge,” “reasonable belief” or “knowingly” leave “judgment” undefined. They use it. They invoke it as the foundation of the profession. But they do not define it.Sources: ABA Model Rules · Estatuto General de la Abogacía (BOE)

It is not an oversight. It is a decision.

The law has operated for centuries with concepts that resist precise definition: good faith, due diligence, reasonableness, proportionality. We do not define them because we cannot do so without losing something essential. To define them would be to freeze them. And what makes them useful is precisely their capacity to adapt to context, to the concrete case, to the circumstance no legislator anticipated.

“Judgment” belongs to that category. And that is why the debate over whether AI has legal judgment is wrongly framed from the outset.

If no one can define what legal judgment is, no one can prove that AI does not have it. And if no one can prove that it does not have it, the argument that AI cannot practice law because it “lacks judgment” is circular. It is a warning, not an analysis.

Which does not mean that AI should practice law without supervision. It means that the correct argument is not cognitive. It is legal.

The real limit is not judgment. It is responsibility.

A human lawyer can be sued for malpractice. They can be sanctioned by their bar association. They can lose their license. They assume personal, financial and professional consequences for every decision they make on behalf of a client. That chain of responsibility is what makes the lawyer-client relationship work, not the presence of some indefinable cognitive quality.

AI, today, cannot assume that chain. Not because it lacks reasoning capacity, but because no framework exists that attributes responsibility to it in a direct and enforceable way.

But that framework is being built. Professional liability insurers are beginning to price the risk of AI-assisted work. Bar associations are issuing guidance that equates supervision with responsibility. Legal services contracts are starting to specify which tools are used and under what conditions. The asymmetry of responsibility between humans and tools is not a permanent feature of the ecosystem. It is a transitional phase.

The question that matters, then, is not whether AI has judgment.

The question is whether the lawyer who uses it is exercising theirs.

Rule 2.1 requires “independent professional judgment.” Rule 1.1 requires “legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation.” Neither one prohibits using tools. Every profession uses tools. What they require is that the professional who signs, who advises, who represents, has exercised their judgment over the process and the result.Sources: ABA Model Rule 2.1 · ABA Model Rule 1.1

A lawyer who delegates to AI without reviewing, without cross-checking, without applying their knowledge of the client and the context, breaches those rules. Not because the AI is bad. But because they did not do their job.

A lawyer who uses AI as a layer of analysis, who verifies its outputs, who supplies the context the tool does not have, and who assumes responsibility for the result, is fulfilling exactly what the rules require. With a more powerful tool than the ones they had yesterday.

The debate over AI and legal judgment has spent two years circling the wrong question. It is not “can AI judge?” It is “is the lawyer judging well how to use AI?”

That second question has an answer. And the answer depends on each professional, each case, each concrete decision.

Just as it always has.