Generative AI In Law Schools And Colleges

ABA Journal, If Law Schools Prohibit ChatGPT in Writing, Can They Back It Up?:

Using artificial intelligence to write admissions essays now comes with significant risks at the University of Michigan Law School, which recently asked applicants to certify that they did not use the technology for drafting purposes.

False statements could result in the cancellation of an admissions offer or expulsion or rescinding a degree, according to the certification language.

Likewise, if admissions office readers go over a candidate’s essay and suspect that technology did the writing, it would give them serious pause, even for a strong candidate, says Sarah C. Zearfoss, the law school’s senior assistant dean. The certification language was introduced this year, and she has not heard of other law schools with similar prohibitions on AI technology.

Many lawyers interviewed by the ABA Journal found the University of Michigan Law School’s new policy surprising. The retributions would be difficult to carry out because there are no good tools to detect the technology in writing, they say. And even if there were, offerings such as ChatGPT will continue to evolve and likely outfox anything created to catch it. ...

Robert Brain, a professor at the Loyola Marymount University’s Loyola Law School, told the Journal that most, if not all, law schools currently have faculty committees considering the issue. ...

“I don’t think anybody is seriously suggesting going back to handwritten blue book essays, but they could cut off take-home tests,” says Brain, who thinks that law schools should teach students to use AI technology. “My personal view is we can’t stop them but also because lawyers are using it,” he says.

Bloomberg Law Op-Ed:  Legal Education in World of AI Should Follow Medical Model, by Marsha Cohen (UC Law-San Francisco):

What would “medical model” legal education look like?

Lawyers for America, invented at UC Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco), is a model that provides students with a different route to learning to be a lawyer while simultaneously helping to improve our country’s massive access to justice problem.

Ponder: Two years of classroom learning and a third year devoted entirely to a well-supervised externship with a legal nonprofit or government legal office. Given the current bar exam, summer is then devoted to study and the test, and then after the bar exam the fellows return for a full year of fellowship-paid work.

The participating organizations pay LFA enough to support the fellowship stipends—less than their cost of hiring a new lawyer, enabling the stretching of their always tight budgets. Bonus: They’ve already trained their new fellow for all of their 3L year. Supervisors are very committed to their training because fellows will soon be their colleagues for a year.

Our fellows so far have engaged in great public service through the program and have moved very successfully to careers. Many of the fellows have stayed in public interest or public service careers, some clearly achieving positions that just on the basis of grades and pedigree could have been difficult to obtain. Their excellent experience—and thus meaningful recommendations—has propelled them forward. ...

For a good starting point to consider change, law school administrators should look to the medical school model and take to heart the feedback in the “Building a Better Bar” report about the value of experiential learning in the careers of many law graduates.

We need to train lawyers for the needs of today, under the conditions of today’s world. Yesterday’s ways shouldn’t be forever.

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Here’s My AI Policy For Students: I Don’t Have One, by Jonathan Zimmerman (Penn):

With the new semester upon us, I recently received an email from my university encouraging me to come up with a “policy” about the use of artificial intelligence in my courses. The university suggested that on the first day of class, instructors should inform students whether and how they can employ AI bots such as ChatGPT.

So here’s my AI policy: I don’t have one.

Here’s what I’m going to tell my students instead.

Of course, you’ll have to notify me if you draw upon AI to write a paper, just as you are required to cite any other source. But whether to use AI or not is up to you.

Though, I hope you won’t. ...

I want you to be intelligent. I want you to stare at a blank page or screen for hours, trying to decide how to start. I want to you to write draft after draft and develop a stronger version of your own ideas. I want you to be proud of what you accomplished, not ashamed that you cut corners.

Most of all, I want you to decide what is real. One of my mentors, Neil Postman, a professor and social critic, famously declared that education should equip us with an effective “crap detector.” And Postman wrote that years before we all got access to the internet, which has made BS detection even more difficult — and even more crucial. ...

Maybe, as the futurists insist, AI will eventually take over everything we do. It will drive our cars, design our buildings, cure our illnesses. It will make beautiful art and music. It will end world hunger and poverty.

Yet there’s one thing it will never do: make you into a fully autonomous human being, with your own ideas, feelings and goals. I want that to be your ambition.

• New York Times, Applying to College? Here’s How A.I. Tools Might Hurt, or Help.
• New York Times, Ban or Embrace? Colleges Wrestle With A.I.-Generated Admissions Essays.
• New York Times, We Used A.I. to Write Essays for Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Here’s How It Went.

• Bloomberg Law, Big Law’s AI Challenge Drives New Conversation About Training
• Bloomberg Law, ChatGPT on Campus: Law Schools Wrestle With Emerging AI Tools
• Bloomberg Law, New Legal Professionals Should Learn to Use AI to Their Advantage
• Chronicle of Higher Education, ChatGPT Robs Students of Something Essential
• Chronicle of Higher Education, ChatGPT: The End of the Take-Home Exam?
• Columbia Law Dean Gillian Lester, AI and the Future of Work
• Reuters, These Law Students Got To Use AI On Final Exams. How'd They Do?