A Law School Banned Laptops. Here Is Why We Agree
On July 9, the University of Chicago Law School published its strategy for legal education in the AI era — and the headline measure sounds like something a company building AI tools for law students should oppose. Beginning in the fall, laptops, tablets, and phones are prohibited across all sections of the core 1L curriculum: Civil Procedure, Torts, Elements of the Law, Contracts, Property, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Statutory Interpretation, and Transactional Lawyering. The coordinated classroom and examination policies will be piloted through the 2026–2027 academic year.
We largely agree with it.
What UChicago actually decided
Read past the headline and the policy is not a rejection of AI. It is a sequencing decision.
The strategy statement — developed by the school's leadership and faculty AI Committee, in consultation with an alumni AI Advisory Council and students — takes effect at the start of Autumn Quarter, and the ban is only one part of it. The legal research and writing curriculum is being restructured for the same pilot year around a specific principle: writing without AI is the foundation, and writing with AI is layered on top of it. Throughout the year, students draft on their own while also using AI for research, revision, iterating on drafts, and preparing for oral argument. Clinics are incorporating AI tools under supervision as part of experiential education. The school is even adding a course taught by a sitting federal appellate judge on how generative AI is changing appellate practice.
That is not a school hiding from the technology. It is a school deciding what has to be built first, and protecting the environment where it gets built. Inside Higher Ed's coverage framed the device ban as a defense of the Socratic method — the live, unassisted exchange in which a professor probes a student's reasoning in front of the room. That framing is right, and it points at the real issue.
The problem is timing, not technology
The issue is not that law students use AI. It is that many use it too early, and for the wrong purpose.
A 1L is still learning how to identify issues, extract rules, distinguish facts, weigh arguments, and defend conclusions under pressure. These are not skills a student has that AI then accelerates. They are skills a student is in the middle of constructing, and the construction happens through the work itself — the slow reading, the bad first brief, the argument that falls apart when a professor pushes on it.
When a general-purpose chatbot performs that work first, something subtle goes wrong. The student may produce a better-looking answer without developing the underlying skill. Worse, they fail to develop the judgment needed to recognize when the answer is wrong — and in law, recognizing the wrong answer is most of the job. An associate who cannot tell a sound argument from a fluent one is not more productive with AI. They are unsupervised.
That misuse is what drives restrictions like UChicago's. When technology becomes a substitute for thinking, schools are justified in removing it from the environments where thinking must be developed. A first-year classroom is exactly such an environment.
Where we part ways with the panic
If the diagnosis is right, though, the common prescriptions on both sides are wrong.
One camp treats every restriction as backwardness — as if the only question is how fast schools can hand students more powerful chatbots. But unrestricted access to a general-purpose model does nothing for a student who has not yet built the skills to evaluate its output. It just moves the shortcut earlier.
The other camp treats the ban as the whole answer — as if the choice is between prohibiting AI and outsourcing thought to it. UChicago's own policy shows that is a false choice. The school bans devices in the rooms where foundational reasoning is built, then deliberately teaches AI use everywhere the foundation can support it.
The piece missing from both camps is design. A general-purpose chatbot is built to produce the answer. Educational AI should be built to produce the student — to support learning rather than bypass it. That means tools that help students organize their own materials rather than generate substitutes for them. Practice active recall instead of passive review. Surface gaps in understanding before an exam does. Evaluate the student's reasoning rather than replace it.
Downstream of effort
That is the philosophy behind JurisNote.
The goal has never been to eliminate case briefing, outlining, rule practice, or legal analysis. Those activities are the curriculum, whatever the syllabus says. The goal is to make them more structured, connected, and productive — and to place AI inside the learning process rather than allowing it to replace the process.
The distinction fits in one line: AI should come downstream of effort, not upstream of understanding.
A student who briefs the case and then drills the rule until recall is automatic is using AI the way UChicago's upper-level curriculum uses it — on top of a foundation. A student who asks a chatbot for the brief has used AI to skip the only part that was ever the point.
The better path
The future of legal education is not a choice between banning AI and outsourcing thought to it. Schools like UChicago are working out the sequencing on their side: protect the foundational year, then teach the tools deliberately. Builders of educational software have the matching obligation on ours: make tools that preserve the difficult intellectual work while making that work more effective.
The difficult work is staying. It should. The tools should be built accordingly.
Sources: University of Chicago Law School, Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era · UChicago Law AI Hub · Inside Higher Ed, To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology