From Human Oversight to Cognitive Sovereignty: A Process-Based Governance Standard for AI-Assisted Legal Reasoning

This article argues that generative AI in legal reasoning exposes a process-governance gap rather than merely a technology-risk problem. Professional conduct rules, ethical guidance and risk-based regulation, including the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, increasingly require competence, verification and human oversight. They do not, however, sufficiently operationalise the cognitive sequence by which legal professionals should frame a question, use AI output, reconstruct doctrine, verify sources and exercise final judgment. Drawing on Mata v. Avianca in the United States, Gummadi Usha Rani v. Sure Mallikarjuna Rao in India and human-AI interaction research on automation bias and cognitive offloading, the article proposes two instruments: the Supervised Intelligence Methodology (SIM), a five-stage process standard for AI-assisted legal reasoning, and the AI Reliance Test (ART), an ex post accountability mechanism for courts, regulators and professional bodies. The core contribution is the doctrine of Cognitive Sovereignty, understood as a non-delegable obligation to preserve independent professional judgment. The framework connects legal ethics with institutional legitimacy, rule-of-law accountability and democratic trust in AI-mediated adjudication.