Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Legal Ed Tech
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Legal Education in Alaska
Coverage of law school partnerships with the University of Alaska so that Alaskan residents don’t need to leave the state to attend law school. The University of Alaska Southeast is partnering with Minnesota-based Mitchell Hamline School of Law to allow Alaska students to get a law degree without needing to leave the state. Normally, students…
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Boyko on Lawyer Training
Anastasia Boyko (formerly Yale Law, formerly Utah Law), at Law.com (July 23): “The Future of Lawyering: Lawyer Training“: Once I came full circle to law school administration, I saw the root cause of lawyer training and development dysfunction. We have not created the right container for development for years. Limited psychological safety. Faculty more focused…
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Law Faculty Innovating With AI Policies
Increasingly, and as the Summer draws to a close and the Fall semester looms, I come across examples of individual law professors developing and advocating for their own custom classroom policies relative to Generative AI use by students. I’ll post links to particularly thoughtful examples, as I encounter them. Here are two: Matthew Sag, (Emory…
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UC Law SF to Require AI-enabled Lab for All Students
UC Law San Francisco (the law school once known as Hastings College of the Law) announced that the school is making its AI-enabled lawyering lab “AI-enabled lawyering lab a requirement for all JD students, starting with the incoming class of 2029, who will complete the course in their second year.” From the announcement: Launched as…
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Choi & Connell: AI Deceleration (or Acceleration) by Taxation
Jonathan H. Choi (Washington University) & Paul Connell (Wisconsin), AI Deceleration (or Acceleration) by Taxation: Even the chief executives of America’s leading AI companies cannot agree on whether their products will substitute for or complement human labor. Yet most policy proposals, from data center bans to bonus depreciation for AI hardware, commit policymakers ex ante to just…
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Pittsburgh Tax Review Symposium: AI in Tax Practice and Law School Education
The Pittsburgh Tax Review has published Symposium, AI in Tax Practice and Law School Education, 23 Pitt, Tax Rev. 283- 353 (2026) : Sarah B. Lawsky (Illinois), Direct File as Formalization, 23 Pitt. Tax Rev. 283 (2026) (reviewed by Jeff Gordon (Vanderbilt) here): Direct File was a program created by the United States government that…
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Getting to AI
Three major law schools have released guidance on AI use over the last few weeks: UC Berkeley, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago. The links go to prior TaxProf Blog coverage, which links in turn to primary sources. I have brief summative comments directed to process questions and therefore aimed more at…
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Is AI’s Law School Exam Performance Plateauing?
Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland) & Donald B. Tobin (Maryland) et al., Is AI’s Law School Exam Performance Plateauing?: Last spring, we had OpenAI’s reasoning model o3 take our final exams, with the reasoning effort parameter set to “high,” and graded its answers on the same curve as our students. o3 got grades ranging from A+ to…
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Blackman: How to Assess AI-Aided Law Students? Oral Exams?
Josh Blackman (South Texas), How To Assess AI-Aided Students? My tentative plan for ConLaw in the spring is to switch to an oral, in-person midterm. Taking a step back, I have long struggled with how to use midterms effectively. The most useful aspect of a midterm is to provide an early intervention–feedback for students who…
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McGinnis: AI and the Unbundling of Legal Education
John O. McGinnis (Northwestern), The Unbundling of Legal Education: Artificial intelligence is improving both quickly and in ways that increasingly matter for legal practice and legal education. One of the most important developments has been the rise of reasoning models to supplement large language models (LLMs). Earlier, LLMs were best understood as systems for fast,…
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Legal Education Existentialism, No. 3
Today’s “Legal Education Existentialism” series started with some reflections on Dean Bobby Chesney’s recent memo about AI at Texas Law and continued by expanding its reach to question the basic purposes and structures of contemporary legal education as a whole. Is legal education entering an existential moment? In this last post today I pull back…
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Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2
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…
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Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1
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…
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Legal Innovators Award Noms Open
From this morning’s mailbag: The National Law Review and Wickard have launched the Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia 2026 awards/recognition. This initiative will recognize law school deans, professors, administrators, librarians, clinicians, researchers, and other academic leaders who are advancing legal education through innovation, technology, leadership, scholarship, program development, and other transformative contributions. Nominations are open to the public,…
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A Law School Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger
Following up on last Sunday’s post, UC-Berkeley Law School Cracks Down on AI: Chronicle of Higher Education, A Dean, a Secret Recording, and Questions That Linger: Erwin Chemerinsky on AI, DEI, and that video that won’t go away. Last month, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley released a terse new AI…
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NY Times: UC-Berkeley Law School Cracks Down on AI
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…
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UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Policy
Last last week, just before the Memorial Day weekend, news broke that the faculty of the UC Berkeley School of Law have adopted an “Artificial Intelligence Policy” applicable to Berkeley Law students – but not to the faculty itself. The policy itself is here. In a nutshell, the policy established a “students may not use…
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AI and Legal Education
A thoughtful piece by Dean Danielle Conway (Penn State Dickinson Law), Dean Richard Moberly (Univ. of Nebraska College of Law) and AALS Executive Director Kellye Testy in Bloomberg Law. A small excerpt: AI adoption has serious risks, including lack of transparency, the importance of disclosure, and disparate economic impact. But the truth, and the landscape…
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“Claude for Legal” and Conventional Legal Education
Anthropic’s brand new “Claude for Legal” suite of AI tools for law and lawyers accelerates – dramatically – the pace of AI technology deployment in and around law schools. Seth Chandler (University of Houston) has a characteristically thorough (and completely geeked out) review of how law students and law professors (especially clinicians) will find abundant…
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Robots to Train Lawyers in EQ at Perkins Coie
Today’s sign of the apocalypse: “Perkins Coie Turns to AI Avatars to Train Lawyers on Soft Skills,” from Law.com. From the story: Perkins Coie’s London office is beta testing a new training program using generative artificial intelligence-powered avatars developed in partnership with AI training platform Levra. The avatars are designed to help lawyers of all…
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Sympathy for the Devil
Building on Jeremy Paul’s post on a recent paper testing the effect of AI use on law student learning, titled (the post, by Jeremy) “Is AI the Devil?”: One practitioner posted this thoughtful reflection on the paper and on what its findings imply when lessons on AI-in-law-school are transposed into rough and tumble of law…
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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Tax Law
Bloomberg Law, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Tax Law: A 3-part series: Don’t Trust AI, Always Verify. Tax Law Still Needs Humans—Pt. 1: Generative artificial intelligence is now embedded in tax practice, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. What has changed is the risk profile. Large language models generate fluent legal analysis through…
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National Evidence on the Effects of School Phone Bans
Hunt Alcott (Stanford) and many co-authors have a new NBER working paper on restricting school phone use, “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches.” (A topic I am interested in, as someone who restricts electronics use in the classroom.) Here is the abstract: Schools across the U.S. have sharply restricted student…
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“Worldwide Tally” of Legal Decisions Involving AI Hallucinations
Damien Charlotin, from Science Po Law School and HEC Paris, has “a database [that] tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of AI-generated arguments.” You can find the database at this link. The database was recently highlighted in a story by NPR. Last year…
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Inaugural Conference: Energy Innovation and Emerging Technologies
Registration is open for the inaugural conference of the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Energy Innovation Lab: Energy Innovation and Emerging Technologies on April 17, 2026. It is free to attend. Register here for in person or virtual attendance. This full-day event will provide CLE credit and features 70+ speakers, including current and former…