A piece from Donald Tobin and Samuel Irwin responding to UC Berkeley Law’s recently announced AI policy.

Berkeley Law recently announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) policy  that, absent a professor’s decision to opt out, bans almost all AI use in students’ coursework and exams. Other law schools may soon follow suit. These bans teach the wrong lesson and should not become the standard policy at law schools. * * * *

We understand the impulse to ban AI, but we need to live in the real world, not the world we would like to live in. Regardless of what law schools decide, AI will be widely used by lawyers. Generative AI arrived in legal education faster than law school pedagogy could adapt. In law, we pride ourselves on the fact that we teach students to think like a lawyer. To us, that means we teach deep critical thinking and an ability to organize that thinking in a structured way. The prospect that students will outsource their thinking is terrifying to law professors and is a real concern as we seek to train the next generation of lawyers. The profession and our clients would suffer if lawyers fail to learn important critical reasoning skills. The cure, however, is training students to use AI thoughtfully and carefully. The failure to read cases suggested by AI, or to adopt AI’s reasoning without thought, is a mistake, but it is no different from mistakes many of us in older generations may have made as children by copying from an encyclopedia or, in the modern age, Wikipedia. * * * *

Read the complete article here?: Donald B. Tobin & Samuel Irwin, Do Law School AI Bans Teach the Wrong Lesson?, Jurist News, August 6, 2026.