Law Commons^™

Using Westlaw And Lexis: The Many Ways In, Joshua Levine

Library Staff Online Writings

Researching the law depends on finding connections between information. No case or statute exists in a vacuum. The primary advantage of using Westlaw and Lexis is that they point out, on a high level, the connections between individual resources. It is disappointing how often students use natural language search terms or basic AI queries to find all their answers. Within the limitations of class time, it is essential to teach our students as much as possible how pieces of information are connected on these platforms.

Vol. 70, No. 2 (January 19, 2026)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Law Schools Should Teach How To Integrate Ai Tools Into Practice, Robert A. Mackenzie, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Now that artificial intelligence tools for lawyers are widely available, we decided to integrate them for a semester in our Entrepreneurship Clinic. We have some important takeaways for legal education in general and the transactional practice of law in particular.

First, employers and educators need to account for law students who already are using AI tools in their legal work and guide new lawyers about how to use such tools appropriately.

Second, different AI products lead to wildly different results. Just demonstrating this to law students is very valuable, as it dispels the notion that AI responses can replace their …

From Contracts To The College Football Playoffs: Stephen Harper’S Unlikely Path To Iu Athletics, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

On Monday night, as the Indiana University football team takes the field with a national championship on the line, Stephen Harper ’11 will be where tens of thousands of IU alumni wish they could—on the sidelines of Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium.

For Harper, Indiana’s chief operating officer for athletics, the moment is the culmination of a journey that began far from packed stadiums and playoff spotlights. Before contract negotiations, NIL policy, and Big Ten championship trophies, Harper was a high school English teacher and basketball coach at Bloomington North High School.

The National Jurist Names Kellye Testy ’91 Most Influential Person In Legal Education, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The National Jurist has named Indiana University Maurer School of Law alumna Kellye Y. Testy ’91 the most influential person in legal education, placing her at the top of its annual list of the 25 most influential leaders in the field.

The ranking is based on a survey of law school deans nationwide. In explaining the methodology, The National Jurist noted that respondents were asked to identify individuals who “sparked new ideas, introduced reforms, inspired their peers, or pushed them to see their work differently.” The resulting list, the publication said, highlights leaders who are “moving the field forward and …

Social Equity And Cannabis Explained: History, Regulatory Implementation And The Drug War Reform Efforts 01-13-2026, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Cardozo Law Photograph Collection, Dr. Lillian & Dr. Rebecca Chutick Law Library

Finding Aids

The Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Photograph Collection documents the history of the law school through photographs of faculty, students, alumni, commencements, academic conferences, lectures, receptions, and other institutional events. The collection includes photographic prints, negatives, and related papers dating from the late 1970s through the 2010s, with the bulk of materials dating from the 1990s and 2000s. This finding aid provides a container-level inventory of the collection.

Extent: 4 linear feet (4 photograph boxes) and 2 oversize boxes (20 × 16 × 5 inches each).

Provenance: Compiled by former Cardozo Law administration and communications staff and subsequently transferred …

Vol. 70, No. 1 (January 12, 2026)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Law School News: A Quiet Success Story: Rwu Law's Enduring Partnership With The Center For Justice 01-09-2026, Helga Melgar

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Cardozo Law News Brief: January 9, 2026, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Briefs

Highlights from the January 9, 2026, Cardozo Law News Brief include:

• Dean Melanie Leslie was named one of The National Jurist’s Most Influential People in Legal Education.

• Professor Rebecca Ingber was quoted in The New York Times on the legality of proposed U.S. military involvement in Venezuela.

• Professor Matthew Wansley commented in The New York Times on robotaxi safety concerns after a power outage stranded Waymo vehicles in San Francisco.

• Professor Jessica Roth spoke to Bloomberg about the release of redacted Epstein-related DOJ files.

Faculty news includes:

• Professor Michel Rosenfeld appeared on Canadian TV to discuss U.S. legal issues surrounding …

  ---

  Go to article

Dean Leslie Named One Of The National Jurist’S Most Influential People In Legal Education, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Dean Melanie Leslie was named one of The National Jurist's 25 Most Influential People in Legal Education for 2026 in recognition of her leadership at Cardozo School of Law. The announcement highlights her role in advancing social justice, innovation, institutional growth, and leadership development in legal education.

Ai Tips And Traps, Patrick Barry

Books

Based on a series of popular courses and workshops that Professor Patrick Barry has created for students, professionals, and anyone else interested in taking a skills-based approach to artificial intelligence, this book gives you a chance to engage with important AI concepts, experiment with exploratory AI exercises, and then ultimately develop your own customized list of AI traps to try as well as AI traps to avoid.

Clinic Highlights 2025, University Of The District Of Columbia David A. Clarke School Of Law

Clinics

No abstract provided.

Turning Risks Of Cheating With Ai Into Opportunities For Better Teaching, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Many law school faculty are concerned that students may misuse artificial intelligence (AI) tools to undermine their learning and violate academic integrity policies.  Although some students will inevitably cheat, faculty can reduce the risk – and improve student learning – by rethinking assignment design and classroom communication.

This article frames the risk of AI-related cheating as an opportunity for pedagogical improvement.  It offers practical strategies to help faculty design assignments that enhance student learning, promote good decision-making, discourage inappropriate AI use, and foster responsible AI literacy.  It outlines approaches consistent with the ABA’s new requirement for formative assessment throughout the …

My Fifty Years, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Contracts: My Journey With Spellbook And Ai Pedagogy, Gregory M. Duhl

Faculty Scholarship

I am integrating Spellbook, an AI tool for contract drafting and review, into my first-year law school Contracts course in Spring 2026. Although Spellbook is highly effective, its educational value hinges on the pedagogical framework structured around it, a framework typically not licensed along with AI tools. In-house instructional design expertise can provide this framework, and the professor-instructional designer partnership offers one model for successful AI integration. Strong tools paired with robust instructional design yield learning experiences in which AI augments, rather than supplants, the cultivation of legal judgment and critical thinking. This collaborative approach, among educators, instructional designers, and …

The Keystone State Should Forge A New Path To Lawyer Licensure, Ashley M. London, Nachman Gutowski, Sarah J. Garrison, Steven Foster

Scholarly Works

Pennsylvania should reject the adoption of the NextGen bar examination and instead develop a new, state-specific pathway to lawyer licensure that better serves the needs of the legal profession and the public. The NextGen exam, designed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), introduces significant challenges, including its lack of transparency, inadequate preparation materials, and reliance on a rigid, memorization-heavy format. These deficiencies hinder equitable access to licensure, disproportionately affecting underrepresented groups and perpetuating systemic barriers within the profession.

Moreover, NextGen's failure to robustly address critical legal areas, such as trusts and estates, jeopardizes the ability of new lawyers …

Breaking The Cycle: Rethinking Bar Exam Scoring And Portability For Nextgen Examinees, Steven Foster, Nachman Gutowski

Scholarly Works

The development of the NextGen Bar Exam presents a crucial opportunity to address longstanding challenges in both bar exam scoring and portability concerns. The reliance on recent graduates' performance on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) as a baseline for setting future standards is flawed due to relative scoring and scaling. In addition to concerns regarding how the future bar exam is scored, there are also concerns regarding how the new scoring metric on the NextGen bar exam will be used for portability and, more specifically, what will happen between 2026 and 2028 as the NextGen bar exam is progressively adopted …

Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, And Dei, William M. Treanor, Amelia J. Uelmen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ability of Jesuit educational institutions to pursue a central part of their mission – that of fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive educational environments – is under attack. This essay outlines several dimensions of their religiously-grounded mission and the reasons to strongly protect from government interference the rights of Jesuit universities to implement programs and practices that align with DEI values. First, for Jesuit universities, these programs and practices are rooted in a much deeper culture of the more than 2,000-year old Catholic intellectual tradition and the now 500-year old tradition of Jesuit spirituality. Second, drawing on the classic work …

Dismantling The Whiteness Of Legal Education, Doron Samuel-Siegel

Law Faculty Publications

Whiteness is not merely a racial description. Whiteness operates as allegiance to structural racism. The quiet engine of racial hierarchy, whiteness pervades and shapes traditional legal education, rendering legal pedagogy a structurally racist enterprise. Legal education not only reproduces the racism embedded in the law and legal profession, but also obscures the ways legal doctrine, professional norms, and pedagogical practices normalize, protect, and make invisible the advantages that accrue to whiteness itself. In doing so, itproduces lawyers ill-equipped to dismantle structural injustice.

This Article breaks new ground in the scholarship on legal pedagogy by defining whiteness as it operates within …

Critical Lawyering Pedagogy: Transformational Legal Education, Carolyn Grose

Faculty Scholarship

In an era marked by democratic backsliding, systemic inequality, and widespread disillusionment with legal institutions, traditional legal education has proven not merely inadequate, but actively complicit in reproducing the institutional norms, professional identities, and hierarchies that have enabled democratic erosion and the misuse of law as a tool of exclusion and domination.

This Article describes a comprehensive, justice-oriented framework that reimagines the structure, content, and outcomes of legal education to better meet those needs. Critical Lawyering Pedagogy (CLP) draws from Critical Pedagogy, Narrative Theory, and Critical Lawyering and challenges the entrenched hierarchies and exclusionary norms that dominate most law schools …

Legal Professional Identity Development: An Exploration Of The Social And Emotional Processes By Which Law Students Transition From Novices To Professionals, David Hall Abney Ii

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

This dissertation seeks to heed the call for expansion of instructional communication research (ICR) beyond the undergraduate classroom and undergraduate learning objectives by exploring older learners and higher-order affective learning objectives. Legal professional identity development (LPID) is a discipline-specific type of higher-order affective learning that is conceptualized as a continuous nonlinear process that begins in law school and extends throughout a lawyer’s career, involving the internalization of the legal profession’s core values and norms and their integration with an evolving identity. Using a pragmatic ICR approach and a mixed-methods design, Phase 1 employed individual interviews and focus groups to investigate …

2026-2027, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Student Handbooks

No abstract provided.

Dual Purposes Of A Plea Bargaining Simulation: Pedagogical Skills Training And Controlled Data Collection Experiment About Crime Victim’S Access To Justice Via Counsel, Tung Yin

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Grading Machines: Can Ai Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors?, Kevin L. Cope, Jens Frankenreiter, Scott Hirst, Eric A. Posner, Daniel Schwarcz, Dane Thorley

Articles

In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, enabling legal-advocacy organizations to adopt them as complements to—or substitutes for—lawyers and other human experts. The role of LLMs in legal education, however, is underexplored. While several studies have examined LLMs’ performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results, there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs’ competence at one of law professors’ chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically contained in …

Interrogating The Facts Of The Case, Anna Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

Buried within many criminal judicial opinions is the origin of their “facts”—the interrogation room. Criminal law pedagogy should expose this origin. If we treat the alleged product of interrogation as “what happened,” as criminal cases (and professors) sometimes do, we obscure the ways in which interrogators are trained to incriminate and to co-create confessions. We also risk obscuring subsequent layers of reporting by police, prosecutors, or judges.

Recent scholarly literature urges criminal law professors to teach differently, warning that we distort, sanitize, and bolster the carceral state when we erase governmental agents and bypass procedure. Treating the “facts of the …

Silos, Gaps, And Bridges: A Call To Action For Law Schools To Facilitate Collaboration Across The Curriculum At The Dawn Of The Nextgen Bar, Elizabeth Usman, Andrea Gemignani

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Now is a time for action. With the advent of the NextGen bar exam and the recent changes to the ABA accreditation standards for law schools, which both focus on valuing practical legal skills, law schools have a unique opportunity. By coordinating practical and doctrinal content across the curriculum, law schools can ensure that all graduates are proficient in fundamental lawyering skills and prepared for both the bar exam and practice success. ...

Part I of this article examines the foundations of American legal education from apprenticeships to the emergence of the case study method. It then explores the calls …

Relentless: The Pressures Shortening Law School Deanships And What Must Change, Katie Kempner, Patricia E. Roberts

Faculty Articles

It is no small thing when a law school loses its dean. The departure triggers a national search, stalls institutional momentum, disrupts fundraising, and requires rebuilding years of relationships with faculty, alumni, and university leadership, all while the institution navigates one of the most turbulent periods in legal education's history. Approximately 25 percent of the nation's law schools transition to a new dean in any given year. That reality prompted this study.

This study combined a survey of 624 current and former law school deans, which yielded 256 responses and data on 294 deanships, with 70 qualitative interviews conducted between …

Ai-Powered Lawyering: Ai Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, And The Future Of Legal Practice, Daniel Schwarcz, Sam Manning, J. J. Prescott, Patrick Barry, David R. Cleveland, Beverly Rich

Articles

Generative AI is set to transform the legal profession, though its most promising uses and ultimate effects are still unclear. While AI models like GPT-4 improve efficiency, they can also “hallucinate” and may undermine legal judgment, particularly in complex tasks typically handled by skilled lawyers. This article examines two emerging AI innovations that may mitigate these concerns: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds AI-powered analysis in legal sources, and AI reasoning models, which structure complex reasoning before generating output. We conduct the first randomized controlled trial assessing these technologies, assigning upper-level law students to complete legal tasks using a RAG-powered …

The Nevada Plan: Redefining The Bar In The Silver State, Grace Michaelson

Nevada Law Journal Forum

Nevada is rewriting the rules of entry into its legal profession. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court approved plans for a new state bar exam that will take effect in 2027. The new format, known as the Nevada Plan, significantly departs from Nevada’s traditional bar exam and fundamentally alters the licensure process for those aspiring to practice law in the Silver State. This Note will explore the proposed changes and their implications through three main sections. Part I provides essential context for understanding the current moment in bar exam reform. It begins by examining the traditional role of bar exams …