About

Leigh Osofsky joined the Carolina Law faculty as a professor of law in 2018. Her scholarship focuses on tax law and the administrative and legislative process. Osofsky is the author of numerous articles about how agencies and legislatures administer complex legal regimes. Her work has appeared in prominent law reviews including Cornell Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Emory Law Journal, the Yale Journal on Regulation, and NYU’s Tax Law Review. In 2022, she co-authored a report for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) that resulted in ACUS adopting twenty recommendations about the use of automated legal guidance, which will apply to all federal agencies, and which were published in the Federal Register. In 2025, she published a book based on her research titled 'Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance' by Cambridge University Press.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Business
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Public economics
• Internet privacy
• Law and economics
• Public relations
• Actuarial science
• Econometrics
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Audit Guides and the Administrative State

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Automated Agencies

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-04-03

  bookSenior author

  Automated Agencies is the definitive account of how automation is transforming government explanations of the law to the public. Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky draw on extensive research regarding the federal government's turn to automated legal guidance through chatbots, virtual assistants, and other online tools. Blank and Osofsky argue that automated tools offer administrative benefits for both the government and the public in terms of efficiency and ease of use, yet these automated tools may also mislead members of the public. Government agencies often exacerbate this problem by making guidance seem more personalized than it is, not recognizing how users may rely on the guidance, and not disclosing that the guidance cannot be relied upon as a legal matter. After analyzing the potential costs and benefits of the use of automated legal guidance by government agencies, Automated Agencies charts a path forward for policymakers by offering detailed policy recommendations.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Automated Legal Guidance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Public relations

  Through online tools, virtual assistants and other technology, governments increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to help the public understand and apply the law. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, encourages taxpayers to seek answers regarding various tax credits and deductions through its online “Interactive Tax Assistant.” The U.S. Army directs individuals with questions about enlistment to its virtual guide, “Sgt. Star.” And the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suggests that potential green card holders and citizens speak with its interactive chatbot, “Emma.” Through such automated legal guidance, the government seeks to provide advice to the public at a fraction of the cost of employing human beings to perform these same tasks.\nThis Article offers one of the first critiques of these new systems of artificial intelligence. It shows that automated legal guidance currently relies upon the concept of “simplexity,” whereby complex law is presented as though it is simple, without actually engaging in simplification of the underlying law. While this approach offers potential gains in terms of efficiency and ease of use, it also causes the government to present the law as simpler than it is, leading to less precise advice, and potentially inaccurate legal positions. Using the Interactive Tax Assistant as a case study, the Article shows that the use of simplexity in automated legal guidance is more powerful and pervasive than in static publications because it is personalized, non-qualified and instantaneous. Further, it argues that understanding the costs as well as the benefits of current forms of automated legal guidance is essential to evaluating even more sophisticated, but also more opaque, automated systems that governments are likely to adopt in the future.\nWith these considerations in mind, the Article offers three recommendations to policymakers. First, it argues that governments should prevent automated legal guidance from widening the gap between access to legal advice enjoyed by high-income and by low-income individuals. Second, it argues that governments should introduce more robust oversight and review processes for automated legal guidance. Finally, it argues that the government should allow individuals to avoid certain penalties and sanctions when they have taken actions or claimed legal positions in reliance upon automated legal guidance. Unless these steps are taken, we believe that the costs of these automated legal guidance systems may soon come to outweigh their benefits.

  PublisherOA PDF

• <span>Wellness and The Tax Law Georgia Law Review</span> (forthcoming)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Automated Agencies

  Minnesota law review · 2023-01-01

  articleSenior author

  When individuals have questions about federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they increasingly seek help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and federal government agencies have not focused on the government’s use of technology to offer guidance to the public. The absence of scholarly attention to automation as a means of communicating government guidance is an important gap in the literature. Through the use of automated legal guidance, the federal government is responding to millions of public inquiries each year about the law, a number that may multiply many times over in years to come. This new form of guidance is thereby shaping public views of and behavior with respect to the law, without serious examination. This Article describes the results of a qualitative study of automated legal guidance across the federal government. This study was conducted under the auspices of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency of the U.S. government charged with recommending improvements to administrative process and procedure. Our goal was to understand federal agency use of automated legal guidance, and offer recommendations to ACUS based on our findings. During our study, we canvassed the automated legal guidance activities of all federal agencies. We found extensive use of automation to offer guidance to the public by federal agencies, with varying levels of sophistication and legal content. We identified two principal models of automated legal guidance, and we conducted in-depth legal research regarding the most sophisticated examples of such models. We also interviewed agency officials with direct, supervisory, or support responsibility over well-developed automated legal guidance tools. We find that automated legal guidance offers agencies an inexpensive way to help the public navigate complex legal regimes. However, we also find that automated legal guidance may mislead members of the public about how the law will apply in their individual circumstances. In particular, automated legal guidance exacerbates the tendency of federal agencies to present complex law as though it is simple without actually engaging in simplification of the underlying law. While this approach offers advantages in terms of administrative efficiency and ease of use by the public, it also causes the government to present the law as simpler than it is, leading to less precise advice and potentially inaccurate legal positions. In some cases, agencies heighten this problem by, among other things, making guidance

  PublisherDOI

• Simplicity Lost

  Pittsburgh Tax Review · 2023-03-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

    

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Democratizing Administrative Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Automated Agencies

  University of North Carolina School of Law Scholarship Repository (University of North Carolina Hospitals) · 2023-01-01

  articleSenior author

  This article presents the first comprehensive study of how federal agencies use automated legal guidance tools—such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and decision-tree systems—to explain complex law to the public. The authors show that while automation offers administrative efficiency and wider reach, it often simplifies or distorts underlying legal rules. Through detailed analysis of agency tools and ten semi-structured interviews with officials, the article demonstrates that automated systems can portray unsettled or complex law as clear, omit exceptions, and answer too narrowly, thereby influencing user behavior in ways agencies neither fully appreciate nor monitor. The study further finds that agencies lack adequate processes for ensuring accuracy, do not maintain public archives of changes, do not warn users about reliance limitations, and rarely evaluate how automated outputs diverge from formal law. These shortcomings, the authors argue, risk exacerbating inequities between users who rely on automated guidance and those with access to legal counsel. The article concludes by offering extensive policy recommendations centered on transparency, reliance protections, disclaimers, process reforms, and accessibility—urging agencies to modernize automated guidance while acknowledging its tradeoffs and safeguarding public understanding of the law.

  Publisher

• Automated Legal Guidance at Federal Agencies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joshua D. Blank

  University of California, Irvine

  8 shared

• Shu-Yi Oei

  University of California Hastings College of the Law

  6 shared

• Susan C. Morse

  3 shared

• Kathleen DeLaney Thomas

  3 shared

• Kristin E. Hickman

  2 shared

• Kevin M. Stack

  1 shared

• Nicholas R. Parrillo

  1 shared

• Aaron L. Nielson

  Brigham Young University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Agency Legislative Fixes (2019 UNC Law Extraordinarily Ambit…