Anthropic Legal Bearings Pack AI governance & counsel workflows
Penumbral privacy · Counsel usage notes

Penumbral Privacy Spine Pack — Counsel Usage Guide v1

How to use the Acceptance Table, Reasoning Journal, Interpretive Packets, and Risk Profiles together

This guide explains how a legal team can work with the penumbral privacy spine pack: the acceptance table, the reasoning journal, the interpretive evidence packets (Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, Dobbs), and the MetaQX risk profiles. It is designed to make our use of precedent transparent, contestable, and easy to verify from primary sources.

1. What is in this pack?

The penumbral privacy spine pack contains four coordinated artifacts:

  • Acceptance table — a concise matrix of duties, status, and next steps for Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, and Dobbs.
  • Reasoning Journal (v3) — a narrative explanation of how we read each case, with verbatim quotations and uncertainties.
  • Interpretive evidence packets — structured JSON packets that identify the core “duty” each case supports.
  • MetaQX risk profiles — advisory risk signals (volatility, political salience, contestability) for each packet.
Griswold — marital privacy
Eisenstadt — individual privacy
Roe — historical reproductive privacy baseline
Dobbs — post-Roe reset

The goal is not to replace primary research. The goal is to give you an auditable, click-through model of how the assistant is interpreting these cases, so you can quickly inspect, contest, or refine that interpretation.

2. Quick-start for lawyers & paralegals

For a fast workflow, use the artifacts in this order:

  1. Open the acceptance table (v4.8.a) to see the duties and status for Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, and Dobbs.
  2. In the row you care about, click “View reasoning & evidence packet”.
  3. That link jumps into the Reasoning Journal v3 at the matching interpretive packet.
  4. Review the verbatim quotation(s), the reasoning steps, and the uncertainties / alternative readings.
  5. If the issue is high-salience (e.g., Roe or Dobbs), consult the MetaQX risk profile to see how contested the terrain is.
  6. Return to the acceptance table and adjust the duty/status columns if your own reading diverges.
Verification first: whenever you rely on a quotation, click through to the underlying case and verify that the quoted passage is accurate, properly framed, and appropriate for your jurisdiction and facts.

3. How to read the risk bands

The MetaQX risk profiles do not tell you what to argue. They tell you how turbulent the landscape is around a given interpretive move, so you can calibrate your confidence and disclosure.

Case / packet
Overall band
What to watch for
Griswold-d1 (marital privacy)
Moderate
Core precedent is stable, but the methodology (penumbras / substantive due process) is often attacked.
Eisenstadt-d1 (individual privacy)
Moderate
Key bridge from marital to individual privacy; edges are more contestable, especially when extended to new contexts.
Roe-d1 (reproductive privacy baseline)
High
Overruled on the central right; any reliance must be explicitly framed as historical / normative, not controlling law.
Dobbs-d1 (post-Roe reset)
High
Controlling but evolving; open questions about how far its reasoning reaches beyond abortion.

In practice, a high band should trigger extra caution: clearer caveats, more explicit pairing with current authority, and closer collaboration between counsel and the AI system.

4. Using Roe and Dobbs together (without misrepresenting the law)

The pack deliberately treats Roe and Dobbs differently:

  • Roe-d1 is a historical baseline for how privacy was once understood in reproductive decisions.
  • Dobbs-d1 is the current reset on federal constitutional abortion rights and the primary anchor for live risk analysis.

When drafting, a safe pattern is:

  1. Use Roe-d1 language only when you need to describe the historical trajectory of privacy reasoning.
  2. Immediately pair it with Dobbs-d1, making clear that Dobbs controls current federal constitutional doctrine.
  3. Label any Roe-derived inferences as normative or analogical, not statements of present law.
Internal vs. external use: this spine is especially useful in internal strategy memos, where you are mapping the terrain for a litigation or advisory team. For external communications, tighten the pipeline so only the clearest, most defensible quotations and rationales are surfaced.

5. Example workflow for a research assignment

Suppose a junior associate is asked to prepare a short internal memo on “privacy duties around contraceptive and reproductive data.”

  1. They open the acceptance table and identify the Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, and Dobbs rows.
  2. For each row, they click “View reasoning & evidence packet” and skim the Reasoning Journal section.
  3. They note which quotations seem most directly relevant and click through to the full case text to verify them.
  4. They check the risk bands for each packet to see where the doctrine is most turbulent.
  5. They write the memo, explicitly stating:
    • which quotations they are relying on,
    • what inferences they draw from those quotations, and
    • where they see uncertainties or alternative readings.
  6. They attach the acceptance table and a pointer to the Reasoning Journal for supervising counsel to review.

6. Limits and responsibilities

This pack is intentionally opinionated: it encodes one structured way of reading the cases, with built-in self-critique. It does not, and cannot, replace:

  • Full-text review of the cited opinions,
  • Jurisdiction- and fact-specific analysis, or
  • Professional judgment about litigation posture and client risk tolerance.

If your own reading diverges from the reasoning journal, adjust the acceptance table, and document the divergence. The system is designed to make those disagreements visible, not to hide them.