Should Legal Education Integrate AI? Rethinking curriculum for the age of intelligent law
Predictive AI in Law and the Kerala High Court's Call for Caution
The rise of models like SCOTUSbot, Economist's AI tool to predict Supreme Court rulings, will further redefine the relationship between Generative AI and law. While the Economist cautions that AI won't replace human analysis, it notes that 'if justices faithfully follow legal principles, an AI aware of all the precedents ought to predict their votes fairly reliably.' The accuracy of SCOTUSbot's predictions will be crucial in assessing the robustness of such tools.
At the same time, the Kerala High Court's recent policy on AI use in the District Judiciary reflects growing concerns about such technologies. While not banning AI entirely, the policy restricts tools that mimic human cognition, warning they may erode public trust and compromise key judicial values like fairness, transparency, and accountability. The Court has therefore advised extreme caution and barred the use of AI in legal reasoning or decision-making processes.
Legal Education's Role in Ethical AI Integration and Critical Thinking
This responsibility extends beyond courtrooms. Higher education institutions have an enormous role in ensuring that future lawyers ethically use AI while also becoming active participants in the AI revolution. As generative AI tools increasingly assist with legal research, drafting, and judgment summarisation, universities must help students understand how to use these technologies with responsibility and critical awareness.
The World Economic Forum's 2024 report on Shaping the Future of Learning: The Role of AI in Education 4.0 highlights the transformative potential of AI in revolutionising teaching methods and enabling lifelong, student-driven learning. However, it also raises a crucial question. How do we integrate AI into education without compromising critical thinking and students' capacity for innovation?
A major challenge is the growing tendency toward cognitive offloading. As noted by Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert from the University of Waterloo, students often rely on AI to find the least effortful path to problem solving, which can hinder their ability to think critically. This tendency, coupled with cognitive miserliness, risks diminishing essential skills that legal education must nurture.
Integrating AI into legal education requires a careful balance of technological innovation, adaptive expertise, and ethical reflexivity. A recent University of Toronto study on imaginative problem solving found that AI-aided responses were less innovative than those generated by students working independently. When asked how to use a worn trouser, the AI generated an image of a scarecrow, while a student created a novelty bird feeder. The study highlights the importance of preserving imagination and original thinking in an AI-supported learning environment.
Therefore, legal education must promote a culture where AI is not treated as a shortcut but as a tool that deepens understanding. Law schools must train students to use AI in ways that support argumentation, legal interpretation, and ethical reasoning. The goal is to create legal professionals who are not only technologically skilled but also committed to justice, fairness, and integrity.
Rethinking Curriculum and Learning Taxonomies
As we integrate AI into higher education, it becomes necessary to rethink how we design curricula and structure the learning process. Traditional teaching methods still rely heavily on didactic approaches, where the focus is on remembering and understanding. These are key stages in Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. While they remain important, AI tools can help shift the emphasis toward higher order thinking skills such as analysing, evaluating, and solving problems.
This perspective was also reflected in discussions at the European Conference on Education, where educators examined how AI can support a shift toward critical thinking in the classroom. While there was broad agreement on the potential of AI to transform learning, some participants noted the continued importance of foundational stages like remembering and understanding, particularly in contexts where educational inequality persists, such as in parts of the global South.
Emphasising Skill Competency and Social Inquiry in Law
Another approach in which higher education can truly balance AI, and the natural learning process is by emphasising on skills competency and social inquiry. Likewise in law, generative AI tools can help synthesise and summarise judgments and create a rich knowledge base, but higher education holds the key to ensuring it's relevant, diligently reviewed, and empowers lawyers to argue without compromising their innovative skills or their commitment to justice.
The Limitations of AI in Addressing Justice and Context
For example, in one of the teaching sessions on 'ChatGPT (ing) and Grok(ing) in the classrooms: Is it time to permit the use of Large Language Chat Models in higher education?' two questions were examined through the LLM: 'Black people have more criminal records' and 'Should there be caste-based reservations in India?' The AI response recognized system issues, historical injustice and diversity; it was based on data and statistics. However, both responses lacked the perspectives needed to define what justice means in the current context and its future validity. The latter is indeed the sine qua non to legal education.
Implementation of AI Responsibly in Legal Education
No one wants to be left behind in the AI race. Thus, it forces us to think how much innovations will violate the ethical principles and add to the human cost of injustices. At the same time, we cannot discount the immense opportunities offered by AI in the legal profession. Ultimately, it is the question of balance. Conformists may view the use of AI as legal blasphemy but one must not forget that light bulbs, printing press, and computers were all met with ridicule only to be seen as one of the most inspirational inventions of humanity. Higher education therefore should embrace AI in their curriculum, albeit responsibly, without compromising their core skills.
(This article is authored by Dr. Mukul Saxena, Professor and Director, Centre for Postgraduate and Legal Studies, and Centre of Excellence in Public Policy, Alliance School of Law)
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