From Laptop Bans to New Tech Courses, US Law Schools Grapple with AI

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Some US law students arrived on campus this fall to find they aren’t allowed to use their laptops or phones in class, as schools push to restrict access to AI.

Others are being required to use AI in certain courses. And some are encountering both approaches simultaneously as their schools attempt to balance traditional legal learning with training on a technology that’s rapidly transforming the legal profession.

At least a dozen US law ​schools rolled out new or revised AI policies over the summer, laying out when and how students may use the technology in their studies or mandating that they take courses covering AI.

The ‌moves come amid a wider push in higher education to respond to AI, including the opportunities it presents and the threat it poses to student learning. A report on AI and education from the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology last month said the ease of getting answers from chatbots can induce “cognitive surrender.”

“It certainly is a time of fundamental questioning of what we do and how we do it,” said University of Georgia law dean Usha Rodrigues, whose school in August released a new AI policy, opens new tab with a default ban on devices in ​the classroom along with a requirement that students take at least one AI-related technology course.

The “analog classroom” policy was born partly from stories of students consulting AI during the traditional law school practice of professors ​cold-calling students in class, Rodrigues said.

“It’s not really about getting the right answer,” she said of the Socratic method long used in law schools. “It’s about being on the ⁠spot, thinking on your feet, sometimes getting it right, sometimes getting it wrong, and listening to your colleagues and their answers and evaluating them critically.”

The stakes are especially high for law schools because lawyers have professional and ethical ​obligations related to their competency—they may defend clients in death penalty cases or represent corporations in billion-dollar litigation or deals—as well as confidentiality rules that impact how they use AI.

AI Regulation and Restrictions in Law Schools

The University of California, Berkeley School of Law in May unveiled ​a particularly restrictive AI policy that bars students from using AI to brainstorm a paper topic, summarize a legal rule for use in a paper, or correct grammatical mistakes and identify repetitive passages.

The law school also offers a slate of AI courses, but its student-run campus club, AI at Berkeley Law, said in a statement to Reuters that the default rules run counter to the school’s positioning as a leader in technology and the law, and make some students “recoil.”

“There’s a difference between outsourcing legal reasoning to AI and using ​AI as a tool within a legal workflow, and legal education should teach that distinction rather than avoid it,” said the group.

Berkeley Law professor Colleen Chien, who serves on the school’s AI Leadership Committee, told Reuters that faculty ​are free to deviate from the default policy if it serves their teaching and learning goals.

“The policy is the starting point of a conversation, it’s not the end of it,” Chien said.

Similar AI clubs have cropped up at other law schools, reflecting ‌students’ concerns that ⁠the technology will be necessary for their careers as law firms race to incorporate AI in legal practice. Law firms and other employers now expect law school graduates to have a basic familiarity with AI, University of Texas law dean Bobby Chesney said during a recent webinar on AI in law schools.

A NEW REALITY

Suffolk University Law School dean Andrew Perlman used ChatGPT to compile publicly available law school AI policies and in August released an online database, opens new tab that includes information from 180 law schools.

A growing number of law schools now require students to receive instruction on AI in orientation, mandatory first-year courses, or in standalone AI classes. At least 36 have some form of mandated AI instruction, according to ​the database.

“I think what’s happened over the last few years ​is an acceptance and an expectation that AI ⁠is here to stay,” Perlman said.

The University of Chicago Law School in July became the first to ban laptops and phones from required first-year classes to ensure that “students actually learn to think critically, strategically, and independently without relying on AI,” before teaching them to use those tools later on, according to the school’s new policy.

Columbia Law School’s new AI policy, opens new tab, ​released in August, allows students to use AI to “test arguments, solicit criticism, and explore alternative articulations” as well as correct spelling and grammar in their written work. ​But that work must be “student generated” ⁠and reflect “ideas, arguments, analysis, and expression that are the product of the student’s own intellectual creativity and judgment.”

The University of Michigan follows a middle ground by allowing students to use AI to brainstorm and research papers but not to draft, edit, or revise their work.

Avyay Casheekar, president of Michigan Law’s AI Law and Policy Society, said the school’s policy is a “safe position” that appears in line with other law schools. But he worried both that over-reliance on AI could stunt learning and ⁠that too much ​caution could stymie “inventive” uses of the technology.

Nearly all schools ban AI use in exams, said University of Houston law professor Seth Chandler, who ​writes a blog about AI in legal education. Once-common take-home exams have given way to in-class tests with software that blocks Internet access on students’ laptops, preventing AI usage, he said.

“Faculty do not want students taking exams with AI in front of them, except maybe in some unusual ​cases,” Chandler said. “The legal material needs to be in your brain at the time that you are assessed.”

(Reuters)