Education Commons^™

The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Large Language Models In Zero-Shot Semantic Annotation Of Legal Texts, Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

The emergence of ChatGPT has sensitized the general public, including the legal profession, to large language models' (LLMs) potential uses (e.g., document drafting, question answering, and summarization). Although recent studies have shown how well the technology performs in diverse semantic annotation tasks focused on legal texts, an influx of newer, more capable (GPT-4) or cost-effective (GPT-3.5-turbo) models requires another analysis. This paper addresses recent developments in the ability of LLMs to semantically annotate legal texts in zero-shot learning settings. Given the transition to mature generative AI systems, we examine the performance of GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo(-16k), comparing it to the previous …

Survey Says--How To Engage Law Students In The Online Learning Environment, Andrele Brutus St. Val

Articles

The pandemic experience has made it clear that not everyone loves teaching or learning remotely. Many professors and students alike are eager to return to the classroom. However, our experiences over the last year and a half have also demonstrated the potentials and possibilities of learning online and have caused many professors to recalibrate their approaches to digital learning. While the tools for online learning were available well before March of 2020, many instructors are only now beginning to capitalize on their potential. The author of this article worked in online legal education before the pandemic, utilizing these tools and …

Critical Race Theory As Intellectual Property Methodology, Anjali Vats, Deidre A. Keller

Book Chapters

This chapter traces the emergence of Critical Race Intellectual Property (CRTIP) as a distinct area of study and activism that builds on the work of Critical Legal Studies and Critical Intellectual Property scholars. Invested in the workings of power - but with particular intersectional attentiveness to race - Critical Intellectual Property works to imagine new, often more socially just, forms of knowledge produce. In this brief chapter, we lay out the origins of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its central methods, articulate a vision of CRT, and contemplate how CRT's interdisciplinary and transnational methods might apply to intellectual property. In …

Technology And The (Re)Construction Of Law, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Innovative advancements in technology and artificial intelligence have created a unique opportunity to re-envision both legal education and the practice of law. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the technological disruption of both legal education and practice, as remote work, “Zoom” client meetings, virtual teaching, and online dispute resolution have become increasingly normalized. This essay explores how technological innovations in the coronavirus era are facilitating radical changes to our traditional adversarial system, the practice of law, and the very meaning of “legal knowledge.” It concludes with suggestions on how to reform legal education to better prepare our students for the emerging …

Automatically Extracting Meaning From Legal Texts: Opportunities And Challenges, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

This paper examines impressive new applications of legal text analytics in automated contract review, litigation support, conceptual legal information retrieval, and legal question answering against the backdrop of some pressing technological constraints. First, artificial intelligence (Al) programs cannot read legal texts like lawyers can. Using statistical methods, Al can only extract some semantic information from legal texts. For example, it can use the extracted meanings to improve retrieval and ranking, but it cannot yet extract legal rules in logical form from statutory texts. Second, machine learning (ML) may yield answers, but it cannot explain its answers to legal questions or …

Using Ai To Analyze Patent Claim Indefiniteness, Dean Alderucci, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

In this Article, we describe how to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to partially automate a type of legal analysis, determining whether a patent claim satisfies the definiteness requirement. Although fully automating such a high-level cognitive task is well beyond state-of-the-art AI, we show that AI can nevertheless assist the decision maker in making this determination. Specifically, the use of custom AI technology can aid the decision maker by (1) mining patent text to rapidly bring relevant information to the decision maker attention, and (2) suggesting simple inferences that can be drawn from that information.

We begin by summarizing the …

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Computer-Supported Peer Review In A Law School Context, Kevin D. Ashley, Ilya Goldin

Articles

Legal instructors have been urged to incorporate peer reviewing into law school courses as a way to provide students much needed feedback. Peer review can benefit legal education, but only if law school instructors adopt peer review on a large scale, and for that, computer-supported peer review systems are crucial. These web-based systems orchestrate the mechanics of students submitting written assignments on-line and distributing them to other students for anonymous review, making it considerably easier for instructors to manage.

Beyond the problem of orchestrating mechanics, however, a deeper obstacle to widespread acceptance of peer review in legal education is the …

Computer Models For Legal Prediction, Kevin D. Ashley, Stephanie Bruninghaus

Articles

Computerized algorithms for predicting the outcomes of legal problems can extract and present information from particular databases of cases to guide the legal analysis of new problems. They can have practical value despite the limitations that make reliance on predictions risky for other real-world purposes such as estimating settlement values. An algorithm's ability to generate reasonable legal arguments also is important. In this article, computerized prediction algorithms are compared not only in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of their ability to explain predictions and to integrate predictions and arguments. Our approach, the Issue-Based Prediction algorithm, is a program …

Capturing The Dialectic Between Principles And Cases, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Theorists in ethics and law posit a dialectical relationship between principles and cases; abstract principles both inform and are informed by the decisions of specific cases. Until recently, however, it has not been possible to investigate or confirm this relationship empirically. This work involves a systematic study of a set of ethics cases written by a professional association's board of ethical review. Like judges, the board explains its decisions in opinions. It applies normative standards, namely principles from a code of ethics, and cites past cases. We hypothesized that the board's explanations of its decisions elaborated upon the meaning and …

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …