Legal Education

Generative AI in the Law School Classroom

This spring in my Property Law class, there were allegations that some of my students may have used generative AI to assist them in taking my final exam. The incident led me to give some serious thought to how we are dealing with these tools in the professional education context, and what I ought to say to my students about it. Every year once grades are submitted I circulate a memo explaining to my students what I was looking for on the exam and how I calculated their grades; this year that memo included a lengthy discussion on AI and legal education. In case its of interest to anyone else dealing with these issues, here’s what I wrote:

As you know, the final exam for our course was an open-book, open-note, open-internet exam. I designated an open-internet format for our exam because of the various online resources I have assigned to you over the course of the semester or referred to in the casebook, and my intention that you have access to any such materials that you might find useful in taking the exam. Shortly after the exam administration, several students reached out to me or to the Law School administration to indicate their belief that some students had used generative AI tools to assist them in taking the exam. Such tools are prohibited by the plagiarism policy of the Code of Student Professional Responsibility set forth in the Student Handbook (see p. 46) and by our course syllabus, and their use on an exam would constitute serious academic misconduct.

I have no direct evidence that any particular student used generative AI tools to assist them on the final exam. The fact that exam questions were distributed only in hard copy, combined with the fact that the exam administration software does not allow cutting and pasting, would have made doing so moderately difficult under time pressure. My read of your exam essay answers suggests that students did not use generative AI tools in any meaningful way on that section of the exam. But the average score on the multiple choice section was significantly higher this year than in previous years, and the correlation between each student’s multiple choice score and their essay score was weaker than in previous years, which could support an inference that some students may have used generative AI tools to assist them in answering multiple choice questions. Indeed, there are a few students who performed near the top of the class on the multiple choice section of the final exam but near the bottom of the class on the essay section, which would further support such an inference. But this disparity standing alone, in my view, is insufficient evidence to support the serious charge of academic misconduct against any particular student, nor has the administration uncovered any direct evidence of such misconduct. So rather than making this a disciplinary matter, I want to take this opportunity to discuss how you all are integrating these new technological tools into your professional lives.

I have no doubt that you will use generative AI tools in one manner or another in your legal practice. They will have a place in the legal profession, as they will in many professions. But they can also be misused, and when misused they can do serious harm. You are all hopefully familiar by now with stories of attorneys[1] and government officials[2] who have been caught using generative AI tools to do their professional work for them, generating work product that contains fabricated citations to nonexistent authority, and resulting in serious substantive errors. I hope you have followed these cases closely enough to know that lawyers who outsource their work product to generative AI tools in this way have already faced serious adverse consequences, including thousands of dollars in sanctions as well as referrals for further professional discipline. I hope you also recognize that these lawyers’ reputations, their ability to earn a livelihood, and perhaps even their licenses to practice law, have been seriously and perhaps irreparably endangered by their undue reliance on generative AI tools. These lawyers delivered work product that real people were relying on to protect their rights, and that work product turned out to be not merely worthless but actually harmful to their clients’ interests. In so doing, these lawyers showed that their clients’ reliance was seriously misplaced.

You may recall our discussion of the robo-signing scandal of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, in which attorneys shirked their responsibilities of care and candor to the courts in order to retain their employment by clients whose only interest was in having their money move around a little faster. You may recall that we dwelt on the implications of that dereliction of professional responsibility for the reputation of the legal profession as a whole and for the integrity of the legal system that we depend on to secure titles to real property across the United States. We can, and should, see undue reliance on generative AI tools—and indeed on any tool—in the same light. Ask yourself: why would society tolerate a legal profession that outsources all its professional obligations to someone else? What value does such a profession provide? Why would anyone need or even want a lawyer if this is all a lawyer is good for? And if a society finds it cannot depend on its lawyers, how can it hope to maintain governance under law?

As I’ve said to you several times over the course of this past semester, I believe in the value of law and of the legal profession. I’ve tried to convince you that you should believe in these things too, and that you have a personal responsibility for the reputation of our profession. If I’ve succeeded in that effort at all, you should understand the problem with using a generative AI tool to help you complete a law school assessment, and you should see why such use is prohibited by our code of student professional responsibility absent specific permission from your instructor. A lawyer is more than a prompt engineer: they have knowledge, skills, experience, and judgment. And law is not just a corpus of text to be processed: it is an interrelated set of institutions, traditions, agents, practices, and facts in the world that are literally invisible to the large language models that power generative AI tools. If those tools are going to be useful in the practice of law, it will only be because they assist actual legal professionals in dealing with those parts of the legal system that large language models can access. The phenomenon of AI-hallucinated citations demonstrates that one of the things these models cannot access is the web of relationships between text, authority, legal institutions, legal rules, and the practices of reason-giving. And if the first year of law school is about anything, it is about teaching you how to understand and work with those relationships.

You are currently undertaking the education you need to become proficient lawyers. That process is slow and difficult, because being a proficient lawyer—a professional whom people can trust to defend and assert their rights in a society governed by law—is not an easy thing to do. A year ago, if someone had given you a citation to a statute and told you that it stood for the proposition that you and your family should be forcibly expelled from the United States, you probably would not have been able to determine for yourself whether that statute even existed. Nine months ago, if someone had given you the text of a judicial opinion and told you that it stood for the proposition that your neighbor was entitled to all of your property, you probably would have had a very hard time determining whether they were telling you the truth—if indeed you could have done so at all. Your legal education consists in part in developing the knowledge and skills that allow you to perform these tasks—to identify legal authorities and to understand what they mean and how they can be used to resolve real disputes among real people, or between people and their government, through the institutions of the law. If you are outsourcing that work to a technological tool now, what value are you preparing yourself to provide to anyone later? If someone in the future tries to take away your clients’ rights, their property, their liberty, or their life, based on a lie, how would you ever be in a position to prevent it? Why would anybody ever seek your help, let alone be willing to pay you for it?

This is not to say that in the hands of a legal professional who understands the law and its institutions, who can critically engage with legal authorities and arguments, and who can marshal those authorities and arguments in service of their clients’ interests, a technology that speeds up some of the more routine tasks of legal work would lack value. It is merely to say that you are not there yet. You are in law school to start building the skills and knowledge that will put you in a position to know which tasks can be delegated and which you need to do yourself: to be able to recognize when your tools are helping you and when they are getting in your way, and to be able to detect when they are lying to you. There is no short cut to that kind of professional expertise; it is something that you build with time and effort. That is why we call the work that professionals do “practice”—it is a set of specialized behaviors that you get better at by doing them. To be in a position to know whether the output of a generative AI tool is right or wrong, helpful or harmful, you first need to have the knowledge and skills that would have enabled you to generate such an output yourself. You cannot verify the quality, utility, or truthfulness of work that you never learned how to perform in the first place. And if you aren’t learning how to do that work now, when only your grades are at stake, you are not going to be able to do that work later in your career, when real people will be depending on you to defend their rights.

I know that these days it can feel like everybody is using generative AI tools to acquire educational credentials without putting in the effort that is supposed to justify those credentials.[3] And in an environment where it seems like everybody is cutting corners, it can make you feel like a sucker to keep doing the actual work you set out to do. I get it. But I encourage you to focus on what it is you are trying to achieve here. You are not in law school to get good grades in law school. You are not even in law school just to get a good job out of law school. You are in law school to become a lawyer. Everything else—the grades, the summer internship, the first job after graduation—is just one more step on a path that you will be on for the rest of your working life. Life is long, and walking that path is going to require you to be able to do things that you are currently in law school to learn how to do—things that nobody is born knowing how to do, and that you will be expected to be able to do by the time you graduate. If you haven’t figured out how to do all those things by the end of your first year of law school, that is OK. Part of the reason my faculty colleagues and I assess you with things like exams is to figure out which of you needs more help to become a proficient lawyer, and how we might best deliver that help to you. We can’t do that for you if you are substituting someone else’s performance on those assessments for your own. And even if a grade you didn’t earn helps you get a job you might not otherwise have gotten, I promise it will neither help you to do that job, nor help you to keep it.

So I hope that you will choose to do the work, even when it’s hard. I hope that you will reject the temptation of the shortcut that trades your long-term professional competency and prospects for the expediency of a short-term advantage that can only evaporate over time, leaving you farther behind. My faculty colleagues and I remain ready to help you do the work of becoming a lawyer, and to help you learn to do the things you’re still having trouble doing on your own. That is the work we have all dedicated our professional lives to doing. It’s a commitment that I’ve made because I believe we need good lawyers. And as I’ve told you, I believe you can all become such lawyers if you are willing to seek help when you need it, to support one another when called on to do so, and to do the work.

Prove me right.


[1] Park v. Kim, No. 20-CV-02636, at *6-*12 (2d Cir. Jan. 30, 2024), available at https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egvbaanybpq/2nd%20Circuit%20Decision.pdf; Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22-cv-01461 Opinion and Order on Sanctions (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 22, 2023), https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.575368/gov.uscourts.nysd.575368.54.0_2.pdf; Garner v. Kadince, 2025 UT App 80 (2025), available at https://law.justia.com/cases/utah/court-of-appeals-published/2025/20250188-ca.html.

[2] Dani Blum & Maggie Astor, White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, N.Y. Times (May 29, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/well/maha-report-citations.html; Phie Jacobs, Trump Officials Downplay Fake Citations in High-Profile Report on Children’s Health, Science Insider (May 30, 2025),  https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-officials-downplay-fake-citations-high-profile-report-children-s-health.

[3] James D. Walsh, Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College, New York: Intelligencer (May 7, 2025), https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html; D. Graham Burnett, Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?, The New Yorker (Apr. 26, 2025), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence; Phil Christman, Of Course Some Will Cheat, Slate (May 14, 2025), https://slate.com/life/2025/05/college-student-cheating-ai-detector-chatgpt-school-education.html.

The Lawprofs Mastodon Instance – A Call for Community Volunteers

Animal Trial

Elephant JudgeOver the past month, as the user experience on Twitter changed under new management, millions of people have migrated to the decentralized social media platform Mastodon. About three weeks ago, in an effort to facilitate that transition for my own professional community, I set up a Mastodon “instance,” or server, specifically for legal academics: the Lawprofs Mastodon Instance. I’m not an experienced sysadmin, so there were a couple of bumps along the way, but the server is now running smoothly with over 300 user accounts and rising. The earliest rapid growth phase, during which I’ve acquired and configured the necessary back-end resources to host the instance and give it room to grow, is coming to a close, and I think it’s time to take a more mindful approach to the governance of this community. So I’m issuing a call for volunteers to help set up policies and governance structures to sustain the community for the long term.

This is not (yet) a request for financial support. The costs (in money) of running the Lawprofs instance are modest, and I am happy to continue bearing them until more permanent governance and funding institutions can be established. There may be a time when Lawprofs members are asked to contribute financially to the running of the instance, but now is not that time. Rather, I am calling on the expertise of our community members to help transition the instance from my own personal project into a self-sustaining, self-governing community. The expertise needed lies in several areas. If you have expertise in any of these areas and are willing to give a little of your time to help the Lawprofs community lay its foundations, please contact me:

  • Entity Formation, Governance, and Funding: At present the Lawprofs instance is, in essence, a group of accounts in my name at various online service providers based on the East Coast of the United States. Apart from the possibility of personal liability that I would like to avoid, this arrangement gives me sole authority and responsibility for managing the instance, which is not a role I have any desire to maintain. So we need some help either standing up appropriate legal entities to take responsibility for managing and funding the instance (and ensuring general legal compliance), or else we need to find a hybrid solution (such as the Open Collective project used by the journa.host Mastodon instance, or an institutional home in the legal academy or one of its governing bodies) to manage those aspects of the community’s existence. We will also need people willing to take responsibility for contributing to the management of the instance going forward.
  • Content Moderation: I set out a list of basic rules concerning content on the site when I founded the instance, and I defederated a number of notoriously abusive instances at the outset based on my own quick review of the #FediBlock list and the mastodon.social moderated server list. But as the community matures and forms connections with other instances we may want to revisit those choices, and we will need a more well-thought-through set of rules governing permissible and impermissible content on the site. We will also need volunteers to apply those rules when posts, users, or instances get flagged for moderation. (To give a sense of the scope of this task, we have had exactly two requests for moderation in the first three weeks of the instance’s existence; one involving a post by a member of our instance, and one involving an impersonation account on another instance). This aspect of community governance particularly requires evaluation from diverse perspectives, and I am hopeful that we will receive input from Lawprofs of various backgrounds on questions of content moderation.
  • Privacy Policy: Our privacy policy is currently the off-the-rack policy that is distributed with the Mastodon server software. It’s a fine standard privacy policy, but there may be issues that it does not cover, or that our community might want to address differently. Because our servers are based in the United States but serve accounts all over the world, this is an issue where input from Lawprofs from different jurisdictions will be especially helpful.
  • Intellectual Property (IP) Policy: One of the first steps I took upon founding the instance was to register as a DMCA agent and set up a Section 512 notice form to insulate myself from liability for copyright infringement by users who post on the instance (or whose posts on other instances are stored on our server). This is obviously primarily a US-oriented solution, and incomplete as a matter of IP policy (it does not, for example, establish in advance a policy governing repeat infringers). We must develop and implement more comprehensive IP policies to reduce the risk of liability for IP infringement in all the jurisdictions that might take an interest in activities by our users.
  • Protection Against Child Exploitation: This is not an issue I expect to require much attention given the user base of our instance, but we should develop policies and procedures to deal with the possibility that material posted on our instance (or stored on our server after being posted on other instances) might violate laws against child exploitation or trigger reporting requirements under those laws.
  • Other Terms of Service/Fair Trade Practices Issues: There may be other terms or disclosures that an online service provider such as Lawprofs would be well-advised to include in its governing policies. Lawprofs with expertise in online terms of service in various jurisdictions could be a big help in raising issues that aren’t already addressed elsewhere.
  • Back-End Management/Technical Expertise: Anyone with experience running a web server or with expertise on data security and best practices for a social media site could be a big help in sharing admin responsibilities with me for the servers themselves.
  • Membership Policies: I have developed a basic set of membership policies for the Lawprofs instance over time as people have asked to register accounts, both to maintain the thematic focus of the community and to manage costs and the strain on back-end resources. The community may wish to change these policies going forward. For present purposes, I have adopted four rules-of-thumb:
    • Members should generally be full-time legal academics; an affiliation (though not necessarily a permanent affiliation) with a law faculty must be provided and verified as a precondition of registration.
    • Adjunct faculty may register but are advised to first consider registering with other law-oriented instances that might be better suited to legal professionals who also happen to teach (such as legal.social, law.builders, and esq.social).
    • Graduate students and recent graduates may not register unless they are already in a full-time post-degree program such as a teaching or research fellowship or Visiting Assistant Professorship.
    • Non-faculty staff at law schools and faculties may not register accounts, but institutions themselves (schools, departments, centers, etc.) may do so, and institutional accounts may be managed by non-faculty staff.

Those are the issues where the Lawprofs community can use your help. Again, if you think you have relevant expertise on any of these issues, and are willing to give a little of your time to help set the community up for the long term, please contact me.

In the meantime, you can find me on Mastodon.