My work

Protecting the Thinking Process in Human-AI Interaction: The Forum Interstitiale Between Thought and Expression

Working paper, July 2026. Comments welcome.

In January 2026 a United States court ordered the production of twenty million ChatGPT conversations. Three weeks later two federal courts looked at the same act, a litigant typing questions into a chatbot, and reached opposite conclusions in the same week. In June the Supreme Court held that records of where a person's body had been remain constitutionally protected.

International law has two categories for thought. The forum internum is absolute. The forum externum can be limited. Neither holds the search query, the exploratory prompt, the unfinished draft, or the confession typed to a machine. This paper proposes a third, the forum interstitiale, and sets out what building it would require.

It tests every analogy existing law offers, from search queries and evidentiary privilege to protected reading, aggregated records, European correspondence and data protection law, private diaries, and neural data. Each protects part of the thinking process. Each fails at the same joint, because protection attaches to a relationship, a disclosure, a recording, an addressee, or a data type, and never to the function of the act as thinking.