The University of Chicago Law School for the win. It’s dean and new AI strategy more specifically which might be described as “both/and”. Becky Supiano explains in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Its policies are meant to ensure that students learn how to use AI responsibly and how to think without depending on it. As newer AI models prove adept at many forms of legal work, it aims to prioritize distinctly human contributions.”

No AI in first year courses. Then a combo of hybrid courses and AI-specific ones. All the following excerpts are from Supiano’s interview with the law school’s Dean, Adam Chilton.

“The emphasis that we have is: How do we teach students to think both without AI and with AI? That second part is important.”

Chicago Law’s smart approach to assessing the first year AI ban and their curriculum more generally.

“We’ll have to see how faculty and students feel about it and how the quality of discussion is.

Our goal is to be willing to re-evaluate everything that we’re doing more thoughtfully. The technology and the students’ uses of it — and also the way the legal practice is evolving — seems to be changing very fast.”

More points for a smart writing add-on.

“I’ve heard many people say essays and research papers are done, we can’t do them anymore. We added, for our substantial research projects, an oral-exam component. That helps to at least preserve the possibility of still having meaningful writing assignments, because the students know they’re going to have to defend it. The skill of defending your arguments through oral exchanges is a skill that everybody needs, but certainly lawyers.”

Enlightened thinking about AI integration.

“We’ve adopted what we’re calling a layered approach. We’ll have some assignments that you do entirely without AI — some in class, some out of class — and other assignments where explicitly you’re told to use AI. You know: Here’s an AI work product. Mark it up.

Even in that first year of law school, it’s true that when you’re sitting in your torts class, you won’t be allowed to have Claude up to ask it questions in real time, but you still have another class where that’s integrated directly into the curriculum.”

What about assessing the new curriculum more broadly?

“The feedback I’ve gotten from employers has been universally and overwhelmingly positive. Employers are thinking they want to hire people — and maybe they’re going to hire fewer people or people that they want to have different skills — and they want to make sure those people learned something. And so what the employer worries about is that they might hire someone who just took an assignment, pasted it into Harvey, edited it for 30 minutes, and then passed it off as their own. And the lawyer is thinking, If that’s all you’re able to do, what’s your value add over what our clients could already do themselves?”

If I was applying to law schools, and yes I probably should because the world surely needs another lawyer of my caliber, I would have the University of Chicago at the top of my list. Also because I could see my favorite sissy, who lives in NW Indiana, any weekend I wanted.