Author: Michael Madison
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Kent Syverud’s Legacy
Kent Syverud, currently chancellor and president of Syracuse University and previously law dean at Vanderbilt (1997 to 2005) and Washington University (2005 to 2012), has been named president of the University of Michigan. Congratulations to him and to Michigan. I write to share a note about his legacy. More below the jump.
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Using ChatGPT to Write Whole Law Review Articles?
Joshua Gans, an economist at the University of Toronto, published a recent Substack essay that might give pause to researchers and scholars in all fields: “Reflections on Vibe Researching: My year-long experiment in AI first research.” His opening: “Write me a paper that will get published in Econometrica.” I tried that prompt (and nothing more
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Instructional Design for Law Professors
In “On Grading Oral Exams with AI,” I asked: Should the teaching profession re-consider the long-standing assumption that faculty autonomy in the classroom defaults also to faculty responsibility for pedagogy-plus-subject-matter-expertise-plus-sociotechnical design? I have co-taught courses with other full-time faculty. I have never co-taught a course with a sociotechnical expert. I don’t know what that might
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On Grading Oral Exams with AI
Panos Ipeirotis (NYU Stern School of Business) has published this illuminating account of building a stack of AI agents to assess his students’ oral presentations. He has a detailed, step-by-step account of his motivations, what he did to build the system, and an after-action assessment of what worked well and what worked poorly. His takeaways
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Chandler: Let AI Curve Your Grades
Seth Chandler (University of Houston) posted “Let AI Curve Your Grades” at his “AI for Legal Education” site. He writes: Professors often face a narrow set of constraints: maintain a target mean GPA, keep distributions within strict percentage bands, and do so without assigning a lower grade to a higher-performing student. The reality is that
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Shout Out to Larry Solum and the Legal Theory Blog
On the cusp of the new year and its new beginnings, I pause to celebrate the astonishing continuity of the Legal Theory Blog, published since 2002 (at least) by Lawrence (Larry) Solum, now at the University of Virginia School of Law. For anyone unfamiliar with it, Larry’s site is a combination of posts documenting new
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Marchegiani on Getting Law Students Out of Their Seats
In the Fall 2025 edition of Syllabus, a publication of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Paul Marchegiani writes about the importance of embodied learning in “Untethered: Why Legal Education Needs to Get Lawyers Out of Their Seats.” A taste appears after the jump. The piece reminds me of a
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Muller on the ABA Council Op-Ed on Law School Accreditation
Jim Greif drew attention last Friday to the op-ed published in Bloomberg by Daniel Thies, a practicing lawyer in Illinois and the Chair of the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar: “ABA Accreditation Protects Law Students, Leaves Politics Aside.“ I want to draw attention to some characteristically sharp
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ABA Task Force on AI and the Legal Profession Year 2 Report
The ABA Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence released a new report on December 15 exploring AI’s impact on the legal profession. The report includes a section on AI and legal education that discloses the results of a 2024 survey of law schools regarding plans to integrate AI into their curricula. It highlights AI-related
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Changes to Legal Education in the Law Firm
“AI Boom Forces Law Firm Tech Leaders To Rethink Training Practices,” at Law.com (Dec. 4, 2025) by Ryan Harroff and Jon Campisi. It has long been a staple of career advising in law schools that legal employers will shoulder responsibility for transforming new law graduates into functioning practitioners. With AI deployments, how is that story
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AI and Undergraduate Education
What is going well and what is going poorly in undergraduate education amid students’ and professors’ access to ChatGPT and other LLMs (Large Language Models)? As a result, what might law professors expect of their students in the years to come? Recent headlines tell very different stories: “AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself,”
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AI Literacy at King’s College London
From “The Global Legal Post”, 2 December 2025: “King’s College London university launches ‘AI literacy’ training for law students and staff” Law students and staff at one of the UK’s top universities are to be trained in artificial intelligence technology. The Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London claims that the 12-week online
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AI Literacy at Vanderbilt Law
At Vanderbilt Law, the team at the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL) has a Substack titled “The AI of Law” where they document and reflect on the community’s efforts to learn about and teach about intersections among legal education, lawyering, and justice in the AI era. (The main VAILL site is here.) From a recent
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Fagan: “The Coming Law Review Shortage”
Frank Fagan (South Texas College of Law) has posted a new, short draft paper to SSRN titled “The Coming Law Review Shortage.” The abstract: Today, law reviews sit near equilibrium: roughly 5,000 annual submissions for about 5,600 slots. Tomorrow, large language models are likely to drive output toward 8,000. The result is a systemic shortage
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Muller: Legal education news of the week
Derek Muller (Notre Dame) has a Substack, “Law School Docket.” He posts a legal education roundup weekly. His “Legal education news of the week (12/1)” notes:
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Canadian Provinces Replacing the Bar Exam
On a new episode of the “Verdicts and Voices” podcast, from the Canadian Bar Association, the participants discuss the Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP), “the official Bar admission program for the law societies of Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, and [as of September 2026] British Columbia.” That quotation is copied from the PREP website.
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UC San Diego Report on Academic Preparedness of Incoming Students
This piece in The Atlantic attracted a lot of attention and commentary recently: Rose Horowitch, “‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’: What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?” (Nov. 19, 2025): Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched
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Horn and Shulman on the Economics of Higher Education
Consistent with the intuition that the economics of legal education largely lie downstream from the economics of higher education as a whole, I draw attention to Michael Horn, “New Study: Business As Usual Could Doom Dozens Of New England Colleges” (Forbes.com, Nov. 18, 2025). Horn summarizes Michael Horn and Steven M. Shulman, “A Looming Crisis:
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Notes on Lawyers, AI, and Money
When I advise law students about career directions, one of my long-standing go-to nuggets of information is this. It’s a piece of wisdom that a mentor shared with me 40 years ago, early in my 1L summer job: Follow the money. For any sector of the legal industry and for any legal services organization, figure
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New “Legal Tech Studio” at Arizona State
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
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Hollis Robbins: The Last Mile
One of my favorite observers of contemporary higher education is Hollis Robbins (University of Utah), a scholar of literature who not longer ago stepped back from senior administrative leadership roles (Sonoma State University, University of Utah) to write and speak about the future of universities. I follow her via her Substack, titled “Anecdotal Value.” She
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Legal AI at Carnegie Mellon University
Late last week my feed brought me news of a “2025 Pittsburgh Legal AI Summit,” a day-long event coming up on November 20, 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). That is literally just down the block from my own law school. CMU is the home of a legendary computer science program and elite-level research in
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McNeely: Collective action and university administration
Ian McNeely (UNC / History) has a provocative essay in “The Edge,” the Chronicle of Higher Education’s higher ed newsletter, that links the future of higher education to better and more collaborative faculty participation in higher education administration. He aims to recast faculty service as an authentic form of responsible university management rather than as
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Farahany: AI Law and Policy Syllabus
Nita Farahany (Duke Law) has open-sourced much of her Fall 2025 “AI Law and Policy” course, creating an invaluable shared resource for law students and faculty everywhere. The material is especially useful to students and teachers at law schools that have not yet begun to grapple institutionally with the implications of AI for legal education
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O’Leary and Perlin: How AI is Changing Legal Education
Dyane O’Leary (Suffolk Law) and Jonah Perlin (Georgetown Law), interviewed on the “AI and the Future of Law” podcast by Jen Leonard (Creative Lawyers) and Bridget McCormack (AAA/ICDR) [W]hat I think every law student should know is that using these tools in their personal world (which is terrific, and as we’ve discussed, a great way