AI is starting to make some classrooms look a little more old school.
The University of Chicago Law School is requiring first-year students to keep their laptops closed in class this fall, as part of a broader strategy to ensure students learn to think independently as artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous in the legal profession.
The move comes as colleges across the country grapple with how generative AI is reshaping higher education. Business Insider reported earlier this month that Brown University said it recently disciplined dozens of students after uncovering what administrators described as a widespread AI-assisted cheating scandal, underscoring how difficult the technology has made traditional take-home assignments and remote assessments.
Rather than trying to ban AI outright, Chicago Law says it is redesigning its curriculum to separate the skills students should develop on their own from those where AI should be embraced.
“We need to make sure that the students are learning to think for themselves,” Adam Chilton, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, told Business Insider. At the same time, he said, “We can’t just naively try to pretend that you can turn off AI or that students won’t use it or they don’t need to know it.”
The school’s new strategy includes laptop-free first-year classes, in-person proctored exams that prevent students from accessing outside materials, and oral defenses for major research papers to ensure students can explain and defend their work. It is also expanding AI instruction by integrating the technology into legal writing courses, adding more AI-focused classes, and providing students access to legal AI tools, including Harvey and Legora.
Chilton said educators have been “a little bit asleep at the wheel” by continuing to assign take-home work that students can complete with AI “without thinking for yourself, without learning for yourself.”
He said reports of AI cheating at Brown, Harvard, and other schools reinforced concerns that students could advance through their education without developing rigorous reasoning skills.
The challenge, he said, is that AI has become indispensable in legal practice. Law firms increasingly expect new hires to use technology efficiently and responsibly, making an outright ban unrealistic.
Instead, Chicago’s approach is to create what Chilton called “space for both of these modes of learning” — teaching students to think without AI first, then teaching them how to use it ethically once they’ve built those foundational skills.
