Following up on Mike Madison’s post, UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Policy: New York Times DealBook: A Law School Cracks Down on A.I., by Andrew Ross Sorkin:

A.I. may be changing legal jobs. But Chris Hoofnagle, a professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, doesn’t want the technology to transform legal education.

“It’s just like you wouldn’t give a second grader a calculator,” Hoofnagle said. “One has to learn the basics of learning before using high power tools that appear to do reasoning for you.”

He helped develop a hard line A.I. policy for the law school, which it adopted this month. The new policy prohibits the use of A.I. for conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising or editing class work, as well as for exam use and translating.

Hoofnagle, who also teaches python programming and seminars on new technologies (“I’m radically ‘pro’ this technology,” he says of A.I.), talked with DealBook’s Sarah Kessler about the decision.

Is this an A.I. ban?

This is a default policy that any faculty member can opt out of. There’s no decanal review, so one doesn’t have to justify opting out.

The idea is to protect the formation of first-year law students by requiring them to do the reading, analysis and argumentation that is constitutive of legal work. Once that happens, Berkeley offers many courses explicitly about A.I. lawyering.

What are acceptable uses of A.I.?

Self-tutoring, getting ready for class. That would be a permissible use. It could also be used on law journals and so on.

Were you seeing something that made you feel this sort of rule was necessary?

We had an uptick in misconduct cases. What the administration told us was that our previous policy, where we allowed students to use A.I. for brainstorming and for grammar correction, ended up being a kind of “get out of jail free” card.

Students would be fingered for A.I. use, for plagiarism. And then come back and say, well, I didn’t plagiarize, I just grammar-corrected. And what that grammar correction did is that it actually changed the paper.

The other thing is that the LLMs became far more capable. It’s possible now to write a graduate level research paper in minutes. …

It sometimes feels like half the world is saying that you need to use A.I. for everything, or you’ll be behind, and the other half makes this argument that if you’re not thinking it all through yourself, you’re losing something. So if I’m just trying to make myself into the best lawyer, is it hard to know which path is right?

I think what we’ve come to is that one has to have the basic skills of case analysis and cogent argumentation. Otherwise one will not be able to recognize a quality argumentation from an LLM.

Seth Chandler (Houston), Law schools Should Not Adopt Berkeley’s Awful New Anti-AI Policy:

Berkeley Law’s Artificial Intelligence Policy, effective Summer 2026, makes prohibition the default for student AI use. It forbids AI in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit; bans AI use in any exam situation; prohibits students from uploading course materials into generative AI systems; and permits AI in research only to identify sources. Faculty are not regulated. Instructors may deviate from the default in writing. The policy is being received nationally as a serious institutional response to a hard problem, and there is sure to be pressure given prevailing hatred of AI for other schools to follow.

They should not. The policy collapses under five kinds of pressure visible on a single chart of ordinary student conduct: it regulates the medium of inquiry rather than the cognitive operation; it exempts faculty from rules it applies to students; its prohibition on uploading course materials is an intellectual-property rule wearing AI clothing; its core terms generate ambiguities the policy itself cannot resolve; and its sweep into anything connected to graded participation produces results no reasonable administrator could endorse. The defense that the prohibition is “only a default” is rhetorical packaging — the prohibition is what students will fear, what gets enforced, and what employers will read.

Beyond enforceability, the policy fails on substance. It substitutes prohibition for the supervised practice through which professionals form judgment about powerful tools, and it sends graduates into a profession that has already chosen AI fluency as a baseline competence. A workable alternative is not difficult to describe, and is sketched at the end of this piece. Berkeley’s policy is not that alternative. Other law schools should resist the temptation to copy it.

• ABA Journal, UC Berkeley Law School Restricts Use of AI By Students
• Daily Californian, Berkeley Law Severely Restricts Use of AI Following Academic Misconduct Issues
• Forbes, UC Berkeley Law School Adopts New, Strict Ban On AI Use By Students
• Law360, UC Berkeley Law Adopts Sweeping Restrictions On AI Use
• Law.com, Berkeley Law Implements AI Ban
• Reuters, Berkeley Law’s AI Crackdown Highlights Chatbot Concerns
• Semafor, UC Berkeley Bans AI Use For Law Students

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