In Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1, earlier today, I asked out loud: “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?”
I’ll be honest up front. I have my suspicions and my biases, but I do not and cannot know whether or not AI is an existential challenge. Instead I introduce you to Professor Michael Plaxton, at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, who is clearly thinking along the same lines and who lays out the question sharply and elaborately.
More below the jump.
In a recent Substack essay titled “To Our Next Law Dean: How will you justify our existence?,” Professor Paxton writes:
[A]ll of the things that law schools can effectively teach at scale – i.e., to a large number of fee-paying students at once, thereby making content-delivery practically achievable – are things that high-quality legal AI can already do or will be able to do better and much more efficiently than many or most of the law students we graduate. Insofar as what we are teaching is sufficiently general that it can be – and has been – delivered in a more or less standardized fashion across a range of casebooks and textbooks and across a range of law schools, it is something that AI can also assimilate and deliver with vastly greater efficiency.
That is surely right.
And
[A]ll of the things that people will want human lawyers for – human judgment, human relationships, human accountability – are things that law schools cannot effectively teach at scale. For the knowledge that AI cannot assimilate pertains to matters that are not general; that are profoundly local in some sense. The knowledge might be local to an extremely niche sub-sub-sub-field of law, involving a very small number of repeat players. Preparing students for that field of law involves familiarity with the highly bespoke practical and legal problems faced by participants in that specific context, and may also involve acquiring some familiarity with the participants so that one can understand why and how certain legal solutions are attractive to them.
Right again, in my opinion.
So: what about AI? Observe the unintended echo here of part of Dean Bobby Chesney’s recent memo about AI at the University of Texas School of Law:
What about just doing what we have always done, but doing it better, more rigorously? Continuing to focus on the teaching of general legal doctrines, concepts, methods, techniques, but insisting that students learn them at an exceedingly high level – such that every law graduate could critically assess the output of an AI-generated brief or memorandum? Perhaps that kind of high-level mastery would amount to a kind of local knowledge. Maybe. But even if it does, that kind of mastery cannot be delivered in anything like the way we deliver legal education at present. It cannot be massified.
Though it is not a popular thing to say, we know full well that most law students do not have a deep understanding of the material we teach; many lack even a superficial understanding. To provide the sort of deep understanding of the law that will be in demand would require vastly more intense, curated, one-to-one, ongoing mentoring, with iterative assessment on every topic. A single professor could not possibly do this with every student we currently enroll. It would not be scalable and we know it.
And so:
“If AI can do all the things we are capable of teaching, and law schools are not capable of teaching much (if anything) else, then what is the case for law schools? … Perhaps there is room for optimism. [Here he links to a Substack post from the former Dean of Northwestern Law and former AALS President Dan Rodriguez] I don’t want my next dean to indulge in despair. But a would-be dean who tells me I have nothing to worry about – well, I can’t take that person seriously.”
Next and last for today: where does existential thinking take the collective “us”?
