Lines in the Sand: AI, Law, and the Fragile Boundaries That Shape Justice

I remember explaining the “reasonable person standard” to my husband when I was in law school.
“That’s just a line in the sand,” he said.​ And he was right.​ In many ways, that’s all the law is: a collection of lines in the sand.

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Sand unsettles us. It shifts beneath our feet. It stretches endlessly. It swallows what we try to anchor. So we draw lines to steady ourselves. To claim control. To declare: this is right, and this is wrong.

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Those lines are sometimes biased. Sometimes arbitrary. But they are never inconsequential. People lose their freedom—through incarceration—and sometimes their lives—through capital punishment—because of lines drawn in sand.

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The lines are not always logical. They are not always fair. There is enormous room for improvement. And yet, I am not sure our society could survive without them.​ Because without lines, there is no boundary. Without boundary, there is no order. But here is the thing about lines in the sand: they never stay put. They are formed, dissolved, and reformed. Again and again.

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Laws reflect our values in a particular moment. We test the ground we stand on by passing laws and then watching how they are applied, interpreted, amended, or repealed. Law is less about eternal truths than it is about the moral and philosophical conversations of an era. It is a living dialogue.

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Last week, two clients and one prospective client brought me AI-generated documents for review. If I’m honest, it rattled me. For a moment, it felt as though the world had decided that AI could replace lawyers—and that was that.

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But then I noticed something important: they had still come to me.​ They sensed that the law is rarely as clear-cut as a generated answer suggests. They wanted a human being to help them navigate the uneven terrain. They wanted someone to stand beside them and draw the line with care.

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Like many people, I cannot look away from the ongoing Epstein files saga. The widespread abuse is horrifying. Equally horrifying is how the legal system was bent to serve Epstein and his friends' destructive ends. These stories remind us that law is not self-executing. It depends on us—our integrity, our courage, our moral clarity. We must work together to draft, interpret, enforce, amend, and sometimes dismantle the laws that shape our collective world.

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Recently, I listened to a podcast about the global sand shortage. Overproduction of concrete, glass, and other industrial are depleting usable sand worldwide. It startled me—not just environmentally, but metaphorically.

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What worries me more than the consequences of drawing imperfect lines in the sand are the consequences of having no sand at all.

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We need shifting ground. We need friction. We need the humility that comes from knowing the surface beneath us is not fixed. That instability forces us to test our values and articulate them with intention. We arrive at those values through logic and emotion, calculation and conversation.

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I use AI every day. It accelerates my work and lowers costs for my clients. It is a powerful tool. But I try not to rely on it so heavily that I forget the fluidity of the legal system or my role within that system. The law is not just text. It is judgment. It is discernment. It is context. It is human.

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So sink your feet into the sand. Feel it shift. Let it unsettle you.

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Then pick up a stick. Draw a line.
Do it thoughtfully.
Do it collaboratively.
And be willing to redraw it—again, and again, and again.

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