GoKawiilOverview
Artificial Intelligence is already impacting higher education and the legal profession, and the pace of change appears only to be accelerating. It is thus critical for us to use this moment to carefully reflect on how legal education should adapt. This memo describes the approach we are taking to legal education in the AI era.
The University of Chicago Law School has long been committed to providing our students with the most rigorous legal education possible. This commitment manifests itself through our faculty’s dedication to teaching, our culture of challenging ideas through Socratic questioning and debate, and our grading policies that motivate students to engage with the material and that convey informative assessments of student performance to prospective employers. With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation.
A willingness to rethink our practices is consistent with our law school’s long history of innovation. We were the first law school to conceive of legal education as a graduate-level program and award the Juris Doctor degree. We also made pioneering contributions to interdisciplinary legal education that incorporates insights from the humanities, social sciences, and other academic disciplines, and to the creation of legal aid clinics that brought students into real-world cases.
We began the process of reflecting on how we should adjust our teaching in response to AI shortly after OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Our law school formed an AI committee in early 2023 and began releasing policies and guidance on the use of AI. Since then, we have added an AI module into our first-year legal research and writing program, introduced several upper-level courses on AI and the law, founded an AI Lab to teach our students how to develop AI tools to help improve access to justice, and negotiated licenses with leading AI companies so that our students, faculty, and staff have access to the resources used by practicing lawyers.
Over the last year, we embarked on a more ambitious effort to reflect on how we should adapt our curriculum and policies in response to AI. This effort included extensive consultation with our community, including alumni, leaders of law firms, business leaders, legal technology executives, and law firm associates, as well as internal stakeholders at the Law School, including our faculty, staff, and students. We also surveyed the emerging academic and professional literature on how AI is changing legal practice and student learning, and how law schools can and should respond. And we have had steadfast support from our University of Chicago leadership, who have championed a skeptical, ethical, and ambitious approach to AI.
The feedback we have received throughout this process has been consistent: We need to ensure that our students actually learn to think critically, strategically, and independently without relying on AI; but we also must face the reality that AI tools are already widely available to our students, and our graduates will be expected to be prepared to use them in legal practice.
Our Strategic Vision
Based on what we learned from our consultations this year and our experience over the past three years, we have developed a strategic vision of how we should adapt legal education to the AI era. That vision has three themes:
1. Developing AI-resilient pedagogy and assessment;
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