The judge who presided over the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal has been urged to withdraw his findings and consider his position after it emerged that his ruling was “riddled with numerous errors and inaccuracies”.
First one error, then two….now it turns out it’s riddled with ’em. Oh dear.
The Times has now learnt that the document continues to contain a host of other errors, prompting suggestions that artificial intelligence (AI) may have been used to assist compilation of the ruling.
The gender-critical group Not All Gays Ireland was referred to as “Not for Gays” in Kemp’s ruling, prompting them to formally demand a correction and an apology.
Whoops.
It also emerged that Kemp included a direct “quote” from the Games v University of Kent ruling, a 2017 case centred on claims of age discrimination, which does not appear in the actual judgment.
The Times previously established the Peggie ruling included a quote from Lee v Ashers Baking Company from 2018, which does not feature in the written findings.
Kemp also misquotes the Supreme Court’s ruling in April in the For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers case, which found the definition of a woman for the purposes of the Equality Act was based on biological sex.
Kemp’s judgment states: “The decision states that ‘such women may in practice choose to use female only facilities in a way which does not in fact compromise the privacy and dignity of other women users’.”
The actual ruling says: “Although such transwomen may in practice choose to use female only facilities in a way which does not in fact compromise the privacy and dignity of other women users, the Scottish Ministers do not suggest that a trans woman with a GRC is legally entitled to do so.”
Anya Palmer, a barrister who specialises in employment law, claimed it was a “significant error in a crucial part of the judgment, explaining why [Peggie] loses on a central part of her case.”
It gets worse.
Kemp’s ruling also features numerous American spellings of words including “victimization” and “minimization”.
One senior legal figure said: “Sandy Kemp is an employment and discrimination lawyer by trade. The idea that he would spell victimisation with a z is unthinkable. That strongly suggests to me that it was written by AI.”
He claimed: “Judge Kemp’s judgment is riddled with numerous errors, inaccuracies and omissions. As such, I feel certain it will be chewed up and spat out when the appeal takes place.”
Craig Smith, a law lecturer at the University of Salford who specialises in legal technology, said features of the judgment appeared to be “consistent with the kinds of errors that generative AI systems are known to produce”.…
In June Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the King’s Bench Division of the High Court of England and Wales, claimed there were “serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused” and that lawyers misusing AI could face contempt of court proceedings and referral to the police.
This could get messy.
The nurse Sandie Peggie’s employment tribunal judgment incorrectly defined trans men.
The employment judge mistakenly classified both trans women and trans men as biological males in his ruling on the case.
In outlining how the judgment would define transgender people, Alexander Kemp wrote: “The Tribunal will use the terms ‘trans woman’ being a person assigned male by sex at birth […] and ‘trans man’ being a person assigned as male by sex at birth”.
It’s like an advent calendar of errors – a new one revealed every day.
Mick Hartley 
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