Faculty don’t want law students turning to AI to generate answers during class discussions.
Yuliya Yesina/iStock/Getty Images
Even as the legal profession embraces generative artificial intelligence, some of the nation’s top law schools are restricting its use.
In May, the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, announced that effective this summer, students are by default prohibited from using AI in “conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit” to ensure “the best legal education possible for our students by equipping them to perform activities constitutive of excellent lawyering.” Last month, the dean of the law school at the University of Texas at Austin called on faculty to “make extensive use of classroom time to engage students in sustained and rigorous dialogue” by making sure students are “not distracted by (let alone relying upon) whatever might be taking place on their screen at that time.”
And late last week, the University of Chicago Law School announced that it will ban laptops, tablets and phones in the classroom for first-year law students beginning this fall as part of its broader strategy of adapting legal education for the AI era. The ban is intended to prevent generative AI from undermining the Socratic method, which has long been a hallmark of legal education; instead of spending class time lecturing, law professors probe students with questions about legal theories and principles.
