The challenge confronting legal academia in AI age

THe unreal intelligence service (AI) eld is hither, and jurisprudence schools across the world are being compelled to confront its challenges. Yet this is not the first time legal academia has faced such a moment of disruption. On earlier occasions as well, it has been forced into serious reflection and a rethinking of how legal education is imparted.When the legendary dean of Harvard Law School, Christopher C. Langdell (1870–1895), introduced the “case method,” it was initially met with resistance within academia. At the time, law schools themselves were not widely regarded as central to legal training, and law was largely learned at the Bar. Langdell’s approach helped change that perception. Students gradually found his casebooks valuable, reading carefully selected and edited excerpts from Langdell’s A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts and coming prepared to analyse them with the professor in class. This marked a lasting pedagogical shift in American legal education.Lectures went from passive (where students would take notes while the professor lectured, or sometimes even read chapters from their treatise) to active (where students would engage with the cases through discussion and analysis). This shift was necessary. The lecture method was no longer serving its purpose: preparing law students for the legal profession. Langdell, himself an appellate lawyer in New York City before becoming the Dean at Harvard Law, would have clearly recognised this need.Even Professor Russell L. Weaver, in a critical history of this method in a 1991 law review article, noted: “Langdell’s case method revolutionized the study of law. It displaced other teaching methods, particularly the text and lecture method, and ultimately became the dominant teaching method in [the US].” (36 Villanova L. Rev. 517, 594).The Langdellian “case method” was later developed and refined into the “case-study method” at Harvard Business School. In this model, the business school faculty faced a disadvantage. Law had reported appellate decisions, and plenty of them, from which faculty could select and edit cases for class discussion. But no such resource was readily available to business school professors. So, they turned to real-life examples from the business world and wrote case studies (usually 25 pages long).According to the website of Harvard Business School, the case-study method prepares students “to confront the complexities” of choices being made. While Hollywood tried to recreate the case method on screen in The Paper Chase and Legally Blonde, it may fairly be said that business schools truly perfected this method in practice. Indian law students experienced the case method as a result of the labours of the 11th Dean of the Faculty of Law, Delhi University, Dean P. K. Tripathi. He had completed doctoral work at Columbia Law School, where this method was widely practised. He asked the faculty to start preparing “case materials” on Langdellian lines.Even today, before every semester, LL.B. Students across Campus Law Centre are distributed their “case-mats”: a carefully selected compilation of leading cases prepared by their faculty. Law students at NLSIU, Bangalore are provided with similar materials. This is unsurprising, since Dr. Madhav Menon, the founder of NLSIU and original conceiver of the 5-year law programme, was a professor at CLC, Delhi University before he went on to lead NLSIU, Bangalore.Later, with the rise of online legal research platforms like Westlaw and LexisNexis, came the second wave of technological change. Purists swore by the old methods of researching the law, where one had to physically spend a considerable amount of time in the law library looking up statutes, regulations, and decided cases, and lamented that the new tools would corrupt the youth. Nothing of the sort happened. Technology merely moved law libraries online and made legal research more efficient.This freed up hours that could now be used to think about strategy, undertake more careful review of case papers, and client interaction, thereby making legal practice more efficient. The legal profession and academia adopted these changes and grew stronger. Can any law professor today imagine spending hours in a library physically going through law review volumes to collect relevant literature for research, when the same task can be done easily on HeinOnline?Now, in addition, we have generative AI. Its core effect is essentially the same as these platforms: it frees up hours by taking care of work that does not require sustained conscious attention. But the important difference is that generative AI, in the hands of a trained lawyer, is not the same thing as it is in the hands of a law student. And even trained lawyers have been tricked by AI-hallucinated judicial precedents. The Supreme Court of India has taken cognisance.Law students are formally instructed in legal research and the use of judicial precedents during law school; it is a particularly important part of their training. The use of AI-hallucinated judicial precedents in court pleadings therefore also presents a pedagogical challenge of a lifetime for legal academia. Faculty are genuinely concerned, and these concerns need to be acknowledged.Faculty concern over AI use by law students to prepare their assignments is very real. The professor wants to see how the student is actually thinking: their contract with the law school is to prepare the student for the legal profession. When the entire assignment is delegated to AI, the professor can only see how the AI thought.Legal academic leadership in India needs to urgently take note of the insidious ways in which the student–teacher relationship is being corroded by generative AI. This can be potentially damaging for any law school’s overall institutional spirit, and for the existential purpose of a law school itself. But the reality is also this: no matter how hard the professor tries, students are going to use generative AI, just as earlier generations seamlessly switched to online legal research from physical law libraries because it made life as a law student easier. And a law student’s life, as the law professor already knows, is constantly stressful.Indian legal academic leadership today faces an existential challenge: how to pedagogically integrate generative AI into law teaching without jeopardizing the professor’s ability to understand how students are thinking, and to prepare them for the legal profession. Will they be able to meet this challenge? Time will definitely tell.Generative AI Disclaimer: This text is entirely human generated without generative AI intervention or assistance in any form whatsoever.(Khagesh Gautam is a law professor at Jindal Global Law School, and has taught law in USA and China)