1. Murray, Michael D. (Kentucky), Artificial Intelligence for Learning the Law: Generative AI for Academic Support in Law Schools and Universities – Report of Experiments (SSRN, 2024).
From the abstract:
This document reports research conducted from December 2022 to August 2024, and in particular, Part I experiments conducted from May 20 to July 12, 2024, and Part II from August 15-27, 2024, on the use of generative AI in legal education and academic support. This study was a cross-sectional, latitudinal, qualitative evaluation of generative AI systems at a certain point in time and at the level of development of each system at that point in time. Although the topic of this study is learning the law, the results and overall approach to using an AI as a personalized learning tutor can be applied to many graduate and undergraduate programs in universities and other levels of education. This paper reports the Part I experiments and their qualitative and comparative findings comparing the performance of public-facing general purpose LLMs—Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Copilot, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and GPT-4o Omni—and a law-specific LLM with a curated legal dataset, Lexis+ AI, and it will reveal which systems performed the best as personalized, self-guided, one-on-one law tutors. It also reports the Part II experiments on using a generative AI system, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a personalized one-on-one tutor to improve a novice learner’s performance on objective examinations in subjects the learner has never studied.
Although the topic of this study is learning the law, the results and overall approach to using an AI as a personalized learning tutor can be applied to many graduate and undergraduate programs in universities and other levels of education. The advancements in tutoring represented by generative AI systems have increased the pace of adoption of AI technologies to the point that GAI tools can play a significant role in academic support in law schools and universities. Generative AI tools can help a student learn and understand material better, more deeply, and notably faster than traditional means of reading, rereading, notetaking, and outlining. GAI tools, particularly Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), adaptive learning platforms, and AI-augmented tutoring solutions, have shown promise in enhancing student engagement, improving learning outcomes, and providing tailored academic support. AI can explain, elaborate on, and summarize course material. It can write and administer formative assessments, and, if desired, it can write self-guided summative evaluations and grade them. AI can translate material into and from foreign languages with a fidelity to context, usage, and nuances of meaning not previously seen in machine learning or neural network translation services. AI also can visualize material using the tools of visual generative AI that literally paint pictures of the subjects and situations in the material that can overcome students’ literacy issues both in the native language of the communication and in the students’ own native languages.
2. Griggs, Marsha (St. Louis), Bar Examination: A Verb, Not a Noun, __ Wash. Univ. J. of Law & Policy __ (forthcoming, 2024).
From the abstract:
The legal profession, long steeped in tradition, is witnessing a transformative shift in the protocols for licensing new attorneys. Ironically, the proposed NextGen Bar exam has been a major catalyst in the transformation away from reliance on standardized testing as the sole gateway to law practice, toward individualized and potentially reciprocal systems of state licensure. This shift has the potential to realign the regulatory hierarchy in attorney admission. Such a realignment is vital to the preservation of lawyer self-governance, and it offers great promise for a more client-centered focus in legal education. These retooled protocols for attorney licensure reflect evolving generational attitudes about professional competency and an increased appetite for judicial innovation. As with all forward-looking developments, the new and proposed regulatory protocols present challenges for the legal profession and the state supreme courts who seek to implement them—the greatest of which might be limited resources and systemic resistance to change.
This Article examines the many new developments in attorney licensure taking place in the United States and offers an account of their advantages and limitations, including their potential impact on multijurisdictional practice. By deconstructing the varied new or improved ways to license new attorneys, this Article will aid state supreme courts and state examining boards that wish to explore exam alternatives. The summary processes and recommendations described offer guidance on the array of licensing measures that are available and the mechanics of their implementation. This Article also pushes back against the normative and reductionist theory of bar examination and applies a new legal realism lens to provide a multimodal roadmap to a co-regulated profession that is free of unnecessarily restrictive barriers to entry. The information presented will aid law students aspiring to become licensed attorneys in determining where and through what modality to pursue licensure. This Article continues an important national conversation about attorney self-regulation and offers new avenues to engage members of the legal profession in their own governance.
3. Brooks, Susan L. (Drexel), Transforming the Law School Matrix (SSRN, 2024).
From the abstract:
Law school culture emerges from the adversarial idea of law that is inscribed in the dominant pedagogy. It is reinforced by the prevailing metrics of success, which rank students through relentless public competitions (for grades, jobs, law journals, moot court, and clerkships) and provide very little opportunity for feedback that encourages students to develop more contextually defined or internally generated measures of accomplishment . . . . The culture of competition and conformity becomes an invisible but ubiquitous gravitational force affecting how students perceive the law and their place in it.
Sturm and Guinier wrote these words shortly after the publication of the Carnegie Report, another time when there seemed to be momentum toward legal education reform. They offered cautionary advice for those legal educators, me included, who still believe it is possible to change legal education culture and continue striving to transform their classrooms and institutions. As they contended back then, legal education culture continues to be infused into every aspect of what we do and how we do it, including the shared values, implicit rules, and habits of mind that shape all our interactions. These cultural elements within law school feed into and are reinforced by the culture of the legal profession, which mirrors back similar norms and values. Sturm and Guinier described this combination as forming a “cultural matrix” that resists change. They surmised that “reform cannot escape the impact of law school culture. It will either deal with it, or be done in by it.”
This essay begins with the premise that the law school matrix as described by Sturm and Guinier is still intact, and law schools, and all of us teaching and learning in them, are still entangled and ensnared by its culture of competition and conformity. It describes these authors’ portrayal of that dominant culture as of 2007 and highlights key contributions from the tremendous volume of critical scholarship that continues to be written on this topic. It also takes account of new developments and opportunities for culture change that probably were not foreseeable seventeen years ago, including the recently adopted revisions to the ABA Standard 303 mandating that law schools address issues of professional identity and anti-racism and the NextGen bar exam. In short, we have reached yet another critical moment that presents a large window of opportunity if we are willing to act courageously to implement meaningful changes at the personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels. The essay concludes by offering a blueprint and illustrations of wise practices for how we can move forward toward transforming the law school matrix in both our classroom and institutions.
[Posted by Louis Schulze, FIU Law]
