Berkeley Law's AI crackdown highlights chatbot concerns [View all]

Source: Reuters

Starting this summer, students at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, are barred from using AI to brainstorm a paper topic, generate an exam outline, summarize a legal rule for use in a paper, or correct grammatical mistakes ​in a paper, among other prohibitions.

The new policy — which was unveiled Thursday and replaces a more lenient set of AI rules ‌that Berkeley adopted in 2023 — comes amid a wider debate in legal education over how far schools should go to embrace or restrict AI use, and whether the rapidly evolving technology is undermining students’ development of foundational legal skills.

Critics of Berkeley’s revised AI policy say it bars too many legitimate AI uses ​at a time when legal employers expect newly minted attorneys to know how to use the technology. University of Houston ​law professor Seth Chandler dubbed Berkeley’s AI in legal education policy “awful” on his blog, calling it an “institutional ⁠attempt to recover the world of 2018” before AI was mainstream. Chandler told Reuters that law students should be allowed to use AI ​to "understand doctrine, generate hypotheticals, test arguments, and prepare for class."

Supporters of the policy counter that students should master basic lawyering skills and legal ​judgment before leveraging AI, and that many students aren’t yet sophisticated enough to recognize pitfalls of the technology, such as its penchant for “hallucinating” legal cases that don’t exist.

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Read more: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/berkeley-laws-ai-crackdown-highlights-chatbot-concerns-2026-05-26/