ABA Journal, Does Artificial Intelligence Have a Role in Legal Scholarship?:

Now that artificial intelligence is actively used by many in academia—in the classroom, for syllabus development and in research—what is its proper role in legal scholarships while maintaining academic integrity?

It’s a question that’s largely left unanswered, says Nachman N. Gutowski, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law.

As new tools, such as ChatGPT’s Deep Research, are unveiled and scholars experiment with generative AI for research, drafting and writing, what scholarly authorship means is called into question, adds Gutowski, the author of a forthcoming article, titled “Disclosing the Machine: Trends, Policies, and Considerations of Artificial Intelligence Use in Law Review Authorship,” accepted by the Jacksonville University Law Review.

Law journals are the gatekeepers for legal scholarships, Gutowski says, but his research found that many law reviews have been slow to adapt to the influence of AI and don’t have policies about demanding disclosure about its use. …

Andrew Perlman of the the Suffolk University Law School: “What submitted pieces should be judged on is their quality and their accuracy and their sophistication; whether a scholar engaged with generative AI in one form or another to produce the piece shouldn’t be relevant.”

To underscore how quickly things are changing, Andrew Perlman, the dean at the Suffolk University Law School, posted an article in December 2024 that used ChatGPT to write a paper about how to use ChatGPT when writing a paper. It’s titled “Generative AI and the Future of Legal Scholarship.”

Back when ChatGPT was first announced amid much fanfare in November 2022, “the actual writing of a scholarly piece didn’t seem plausible. The technology wasn’t sufficiently advanced,” Perlman says.

But the tool has quickly evolved. And in December 2024, Perlman crafted a series of prompts to develop the article, which serves two purposes, he says.

“One was to demonstrate the ability of generative AI to contribute meaningfully to scholarship and, secondly, to set out a theory for what that might look like, so that people could actually see how generative AI can, quote, unquote, think about scholarship and while producing it at the same time,” he says.

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