Robert Ambrogi Blog
The University of Chicago Law School yesterday released a comprehensive AI Strategy Statement that will reshape how it teaches first-year students, how it assesses upper-level writing, and how it integrates AI tools across its curriculum — including a pilot program that will prohibit laptops, tablets and phones in all core 1L classes starting this fall.
The strategy statement, titled Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era, is the product of a year-long consultation process involving alumni, law firm leaders, legal technology executives, young associates, and the school’s own faculty and students. The school has also launched an AI Hub collecting its AI-related policies, courses and resources.
The device ban is the element likely to draw the most attention and debate. But it is only one piece of a broader framework that seeks to find a balance in the tension every law school now faces: Students must learn to think without AI, even as the profession they are entering increasingly expects them to work with it.
It is a tension that recently drew UC Berkeley School of Law to adopt one of the most restrictive student AI policies of any top law school, barring the use of gen AI for nearly every step of producing graded work.
Three Themes
Compared to Berkeley, UChicago’s policy takes a middle path, organized around three themes:
- Developing “AI-resilient” pedagogy and assessment.
- Elevating the “essential human” skills that distinguish excellent lawyers.
- Teaching the responsible, effective and ethical use of AI.
On the concept of AI resilience, the school says that rather than trying to ban AI outright or police its use, it will redesign teaching and assessment so that they reward sustained, effortful engagement with the material and make offloading work to AI less attractive.
It will seek to do this while still encouraging uses of AI that deepen learning, such as clarifying background concepts before class or generating practice problems while studying.
William Hubbard, the Clifton R. Musser professor of law and economics and chair of the law school’s AI Committee, said the profession’s transformation by AI is already here. “We’re no longer talking future tense here,” he said in a story published by the law school.
In his view, policies built around lists of permitted and prohibited AI uses have become unworkable as AI gets embedded into everything lawyers and students touch.
Dean Adam Chilton said that the strategy is consistent with the school’s history of curricular innovation, saying the school has always been focused on producing graduates prepared to be excellent lawyers, and that this moment is no different.
What Changes for Students
The statement sets out how the school will put these three themes into effect across the curriculum:
1L core courses. During the 2026–2027 academic year, the school will pilot a coordinated no-device policy across all sections of its nine core 1L courses, from Civil Procedure to Transactional Lawyering. Exams in those courses will be administered in class without access to the internet, electronic files or apps. Professors are authorized to make limited exceptions to designate classroom “scribes” to take notes electronically for the class and to use devices for activities such as in-class polling. The school says it will accommodate disabilities as required by law.
“The 1L year is a crucial, formative period for law students,” the statement says. “It lays the foundation for the development of critical thinking, legal writing skills, and strategic judgment throughout law school and in professional life.”
The school notes that the no-device rule is not entirely new. Individual faculty members have imposed it for years, reporting better discussions and engagement. But making it uniform across the entire 1L core is a significant step, and one few peer schools have taken.
1L legal research and writing. Here the school takes a different tack. Because most students will be expected to use AI in their 1L summer jobs, the LRW program will be restructured to treat writing without AI as the foundation, layering AI use — such as for research, revision, iteration and oral argument prep — on top of it. Students and instructors will review both the students’ writing and their use of AI, with the goal of producing graduates who can supervise AI and critique its output.
Upper-level writing. Perhaps the most interesting change is to the substantial research paper (SRP) that every UChicago J.D. student must complete. Beginning with this year’s 2Ls, the school is adding a requirement that every student defend their SRP in an in-person oral discussion with their supervising professor — either one-on-one or as a workshop-style class presentation — answering questions that probe the paper’s reasoning and implications.
The school says there is a dual rationale for the requirement. First, it “makes the SRP more AI-resilient by providing a test of a student’s thinking about what they have written in a setting where they cannot lean on technology.” Second, it provides valuable training for students for a profession in which they will have to explain and defend ideas in real time.
Electives. In upper-level electives, the Socratic method, no-device policies and closed exams remain, but as defaults rather than mandates, with faculty encouraged to experiment.
“In the upper-level curriculum and the elective courses that 1Ls take in the Spring, the goal of our AI policies shifts to providing guidance and fostering experimentation,” the statement says.
Some faculty are already building custom chatbots as study aids and using AI-generated practice problems.
Clinics. The school’s clinics will become the primary sites for supervised, hands-on AI training with real clients. Several clinics have already adopted practice-specific AI tools, and the school says it is procuring additional tools for transactional work, immigration work and litigation discovery, with each clinic developing its own AI-use policies to guard against AI-created errors in court filings.
The Backstory
The school says it first formed an AI committee in early 2023, shortly after ChatGPT’s release, and has since added an AI module to its first-year LRW program, launched upper-level AI courses, founded an AI Lab focused on building access-to-justice tools, and negotiated licenses with leading AI companies to give students, faculty and staff access to the same tools practicing lawyers use.
This new statement grew out of a more focused effort over the past year, including the creation of a 15-member AI Advisory Council of alumni at major firms and AI companies, plus focus groups with young associates and students.
Hubbard said he had worried that different stakeholders would give conflicting advice, but instead heard the same message from all of them: AI cannot be allowed to compromise the learning process students go through in law school.
In the law school’s story, UChicago graduate David A. Gordon, a partner at Sidley and an AI Council member, endorsed the approach, saying the school is keeping rigorous analysis and the development of judgment at the heart of its curriculum, augmented but not replaced by AI — which, he said, is exactly what success in the profession will require.
My Take
When Berkeley adopted its restrictive AI policy, the concern I and others had was that it would stifle students’ ability to develop AI competency, at a time when that is as much a core skill for a new lawyer as the rest of what law schools teach.
Rather than presume that law schools can either ban AI or fully embrace it, UChicago’s policy acknowledges that the answer differs depending on where a student is in the learning process, just as AI shortcuts that make a fourth-year associate more efficient can shortchange a 1L’s education.
By drawing that line most sharply at the 1L year, and allowing greater experimentation and nuance in subsequent years, strikes me as a sensible approach, although I’m not sure an outright ban on all devices is necessary to do that.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the policy is the oral defense requirement for research papers. I do not know how many other schools, if any, have similar SRP requirements, but I like the school’s approach of addressing the AI-authorship problem by testing the student’s own knowledge of the topic, rather than by using surveillance software or detection tools.
Overall, the policy gives faculty and students, at least after the first year, discretion and flexibility to experiment with AI without abandoning pedagogy or stifling innovation.
“AI-resilient pedagogy does not mean trying to prevent all student use of AI,” the statement says. “We do not want to deter uses of AI that can increase students’ effort and engagement, such as asking AI to clarify background concepts while reading before class or asking AI to generate practice problems while studying.”