Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law recently announced the launch of an “AI and Legal Tech Studio,” to be led by recruiting Sean Harrington from the University of Oklahoma College of Law.
ASU’s press release claims that this initiative is “a key milestone in ASU Law’s bold initiative to reimagine legal education for the artificial intelligence era.” To anyone who has followed ASU’s initiatives over the last 20+ years – the Michael Crow era – the puffery is to be expected and easily discounted. Under President Crow’s leadership, ASU has launched a lot of bold initiatives. The university should be credited with an unusual amount of institutional ambition and with the organizational capacity to try new and different things. The proof of the re-imagination pudding is in the eating, however. What this “studio” turns out to be, even with sound and experienced leadership, remains to be seen.
Some additional notes:
On the name:
I have more than one friend who claims to be running a “venture studio,” which is not the same thing as a venture fund but which clearly aims to rebrand the “startup studio” or the “startup incubator” via a sprinkling of rhetorical Sand Hill Road venture capital pixie dust. Now a law school is getting into the rhetorical branding game. Ignore the name of the ASU “studio.” I went to school on Sand Hill Road (that’s literally true!), back before Sand Hill Road was paved metaphorically with yellow bricks. It’s just a road.
On what a “studio” in a law school might do:
Fifty-plus years ago, clinical legal education in the US was born, anchored in newly-institutionalized versions of the idea that the best way to train people to become lawyers was (is) to put them in supervised live-client situations – apprenticeship training of a sort, but in (or adjacent to, programmatically speaking) law schools. The clinical legal education sector is now broad and deep and subject to critical examination of multiple sorts; its power and its limits are well-known.
“Experiential” education, however, is more than clinical education. And numerous law schools around the world, not only in the US, operate “law labs.”
What is a law lab? So far as I know, there is no standard definition, no standard list of things that law labs do or that students do in law labs. The “lab” is, like a “studio,” a rhetorical placeholder waiting for practice to catch up and produce some coherent set of “things that labs do.” For now, “labs” are “experiential” credit-bearing opportunities for lawyers-in-training, supervised (often but, I think, not always) by full-time faculty . There may be clients involved, in a classic client-service relationship, but not necessarily. A “law lab” may be advising public sector institutions, collaborating with other units at the university, developing technology, or all three of those things, or more (or different). ASU’s new “studio” seems to be one of these things, a “lab” in all but name.
As a form of institutional diversification, “law labs” fascinate me. Not long ago, I created this list of “law labs” in law schools (see [3] at this site), simply to get a sense of their scale. I was surprised by their number. I wonder about their future, and their influence(s) on the larger trajectories of legal education.
