The era of artificial intelligence has arrived, and law schools around the world are being forced to confront its challenges. However, this is not the first time legal academia has faced such a moment of turmoil. On previous occasions too, she had to think hard and rethink how to impart legal education.
When the legendary dean of Harvard Law School, Christopher C. Langdale’s (1870-1895) “case method” was initially met with resistance within academia. At that time, law schools themselves were not widely considered central to legal training, and law was largely learned at the bar. Langdale’s approach has helped change this perception. Gradually, students found his casebooks valuable, as they read carefully selected and edited excerpts from Langdell’s book A Select Case on Contract Law, and were prepared to analyze them with the professor in class. This marked a lasting pedagogical shift in American legal education.
Lectures have shifted from passive (where students take notes while the professor is lecturing, or even sometimes read chapters from their thesis) to active (where students interact with cases through discussion and analysis). This transformation was necessary. The lecture method no longer serves its purpose: preparing law students for the legal profession. Langdale, who was himself an appellate attorney in New York City before becoming dean of Harvard Law School, clearly recognized this need.
Even Professor Russell L. Weaver, in a critical history of the method in a 1991 Law Review article, noted: “The Langdale case method revolutionized the study of law. It replaced other teaching methods, especially the text and lecture method, and eventually became the dominant teaching method in [the US](36 Villanova L. Rev. 517, 594).
Langdelian’s “case method” was later developed and refined into the “case study method” at Harvard Business School. In this model, business school faculty faced disadvantages. Law has informed appellate decisions, many of them, from which faculty can select and edit cases for class discussion. But such a resource was not readily available to business school professors. So, they turned to real-life examples from the business world and wrote case studies (usually 25 pages).
According to the Harvard Business School website, the case study method prepares students to “confront the complexity” of the choices made. While Hollywood has tried to recreate the case style on screen in The Paper Chase and Legally Blonde, it is safe to say that business schools have truly mastered this style in practice. Indian law students have experimented with case handling as a result of the efforts of the 11th Dean of Delhi University Law School, Dean PK Tripathi. He had completed his doctoral work at Columbia Law School, where the technique was widely practiced. He asked faculty to begin preparing Langdelian-style “case materials.”
Even today, before every semester, LLB. Case Files are distributed to students through the campus Law Center: a carefully selected collection of leading cases prepared by faculty. Law students at NLSIU, Bangalore are provided with similar materials. This is not surprising, given that Dr. Madhav Menon, founder of NLSIU and original designer of the 5-year law programme, was a professor at CLC at Delhi University before taking the helm of NLSIU in Bangalore.
Later, with the emergence of online legal research platforms such as Westlaw and LexisNexis, came the second wave of technological change. Fundamentalists swore by the old methods of researching the law, where one had to spend a great deal of time in the law library looking up laws, regulations, and cases, and lamented that the new tools would corrupt the youth. Nothing of the sort happened. Technology has only moved law libraries online and made legal research more efficient.
This has freed up hours that can now be used to think about strategy, conduct a more thorough review of case papers, and interact with clients, making the legal practice more efficient. The legal profession and academia have embraced these changes and become stronger. Can any law professor today imagine spending hours in a library physically going through law review volumes to collect literature relevant to the research, when the same task can be easily done on HeinOnline?
Now, in addition, we have generative AI. Its basic effect is essentially the same as that of these platforms: it frees up hours by taking care of work that does not require constant conscious attention. But the important difference is that generative AI, which is in the hands of a trained lawyer, is not the same as that which is in the hands of a law student. Even trained lawyers have been duped by hallucinated AI case law. The Supreme Court of India has taken note of this.
Law students are formally trained in legal research and use of case law during law school; It is a particularly important part of their training. Thus, the use of AI-driven case law in judicial arguments also represents a lifelong pedagogical challenge for legal academia. Faculty are truly concerned, and these concerns must be acknowledged.
Faculty concern about law students using AI to prepare their assignments is very real. The professor wants to see how the student actually thinks: his contract with the law school is to prepare the student for the legal profession. When the entire task is delegated to the AI, the professor can only see how the AI thinks.
India’s legal academic leadership needs to urgently pay attention to the insidious ways in which the student-teacher relationship is being eroded by generative AI. This would be detrimental to the overall institutional ethos of any law school, and to the existential purpose of the law school itself. But the truth is also this: No matter how hard a professor tries, students will use generative AI, just as previous generations seamlessly turned to online legal research from physical law libraries because it made life as a law student easier. The life of a law student, as the law professor knows, is constantly stressful.
Today, Indian legal academic leadership faces an existential challenge: how to integrate generative AI into law teaching without compromising the professor’s ability to understand how students think, and prepare them for the legal profession. Will they be able to meet this challenge? Time will definitely tell.
Generative AI Disclaimer: This text was entirely human-generated with no intervention or assistance from generative AI in any way.
(Khajesh Gautam is Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School and has taught law in the USA and China)
