The era of artificial intelligence (AI) is having a significant impact on higher education and the legal profession, and the speed of change seems only to be accelerating. In this perspective, it is crucial that we carefully reflect on how legal education should adapt. According to law.uchicago.edu, the University of Chicago Law School has always been committed to offering students the most rigorous legal education possible.
This approach is manifested through the faculty’s commitment to teaching, an environment that challenges ideas through Socratic questioning and debates, and evaluation policies that encourage students to engage with the content, providing informative assessments of student performance for future employers. With AI altering higher education, the commitment to a rigorous legal education must also include an openness to rapid adaptation.
Consistent with the school’s long history of innovation, it pioneered conceiving legal education as a graduate-level program, granting the Doctor of Law degree. It also contributed 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 involved students in real cases.
Shortly after the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022, the school began a process of reflection on how to adjust its teaching in response to AI. In 2023, the University of Chicago Law School created an AI committee, launched policies and guidelines on the use of AI, and integrated an AI module into its legal research and writing program for first-year students. Since then, it has introduced several advanced courses on AI and the law, founded an AI Lab to teach students how to develop AI tools to improve access to justice, and negotiated licenses with major AI companies so that students, faculty, and staff have access to resources used by practicing lawyers.
Based on feedback and experience gained, the school developed a strategic vision of how to adapt legal education to the AI era, with three main themes:
- Development of AI-resilient pedagogy and assessment;
- Elevation of essential human skills that distinguish great lawyers; and
- Teaching the responsible, effective, and ethical use of AI.
The implementation of this vision in practice involves policies that apply to the main elements of the legal curriculum: mandatory 1L courses, 1L legal research and writing, elective courses, advanced writing requirements, and clinical education. During the 2026-2027 academic year, for example, the school will adopt rules that establish consistent standards for AI-resilient teaching and assessment across all sections of mandatory 1L courses.