Law Schools Outlaw AI Amid Fears of Stunted Academic Growth

Law schools in the United States have begun banning artificial intelligence in the classroom, according to a Financial Times column Monday (Sept. 7) by Patti Waldmeir.

The University of Chicago Law School is among the institutions imposing these restrictions. For the new academic year, phones, tablets and laptops will be forbidden in core first-year classrooms, the column said.

“The whole point is to do things the hard way—because that’s how you learn,” said William Hubbard, chair of the law school’s AI committee, per the column.

“The hard way” has historically meant using the Socratic method to debate cases and legal principles in front of professors and classmates, the column said. That’s tougher to do with AI.

“The power of AI tools and the legal profession’s eagerness to adopt [them] are at an inflection point, so we really felt a sense of urgency to act,” Hubbard said, per the column, although the school isn’t going as far as imposing a blanket AI ban.

“We take as a starting point that our students are going to use it, so how do we adapt our curriculum to reflect that, not wish it away?” asked the law school’s dean, Adam Chilton, per the column.

Additionally, a new policy at The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law forbids the use of generative AI “for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit,” according to the column.

“Our default is that when a student is turning in work, it shouldn’t be that of Claude,” law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in the report, adding that professors still have some discretion. “If AI is doing the thinking and writing for them, we aren’t teaching them how to do it.”

AI has made inroads into the legal profession, becoming embedded infrastructure in law firms and in-house operations. Investors took notice last year, with funding to legal technology startups exceeding $2.4 billion in the first nine months of 2025.

Meanwhile, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Enterprise AI Gains Ground, but Scale Remains Uneven” found in August that 95% of financial services firms report broad or embedded use of new AI in data and technology. That’s compared to 84% for healthcare firms and 81% for media firms.

“The results suggest that financial firms are scaling AI fastest where the rules are clear, the data can be checked, and the outcomes can be measured,” PYMNTS reported Aug. 7.

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