News from Austin: Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas (UT) School of Law circulated a long-ish memo the other day that lays out a mostly clear-eyed, common-sense view of how artificial intelligence technologies and systems ought to be folded into the legal education program at that law school. Here at TaxProf, Kevin Johnson had the news right away, together with a link to a praiseworthy comment from Seth Chandler.

I have a couple of notes.

Note one:

The memo affirms that UT is steering in the direction of a thoughtful, full-bore critical embrace of AI for students, faculty, staff, and graduates. That’s the common sense part A. And the memo also affirms that certain features of legal education as we (the faculty in particular) have come to know it and practice it are affected by AI … in ways yet to be sussed out. That’s the common sense part B. And those may not be sussed out easily or quickly. Paraphrasing (see the memo at p. 5) and borrowing from Seth Chandler’s summary:

[Chesney] starts from the lawyer capabilities AI, he asserts, cannot supply: rigorous analysis, deep command of the conceptual structure of a body of law, discernment, persuasion in live and high-stakes settings, and judgment under genuine uncertainty. He is probably right, at least for 2026. He then asks whether ubiquitous AI threatens a school’s ability to build those, and reaches for the right history.

Chandler’s comment – “He is probably right, at least for 2026” – gets at:

Note two:

U.S. law schools, and perhaps law schools and law faculties elsewhere, are still tiptoeing around AI as if it is an uninvited guest that is threatening to spoil the party. Dean Chesney’s memo, thoughtful as it is, reads to me like a great lawyer’s effort to express his and his faculty’s navigating around a problem rather than wrestling with its deep structure. The list of “lawyer capabilities” in the memo (again, see p. 5), which are listed under the heading “educational rigor,” sound to me like the ambitions that made 20th century legal education great, and robust, and enduring, for many if not all of the people and institutions that it touched, including those it excluded.

What about the 21st century?

What if artificial intelligence is an existential challenge to current systems of training lawyers, rather than a moment in technological evolution that calls for institutional resilience and adaptation?

That is the subject of Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2, yet to come.