Legal Profession Commons^™

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

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence For Lawyers: I’M Sorry Dave, I’M Afraid I Can’T Do That: Competence, Confidentiality, And Communication, Cliff Mckinney

Arkansas Law Notes

In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship’s onboard computer, HAL, calmly refuses to follow the astronaut’s command with the chilling words, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” HAL’s response has become a cultural shorthand for what happens when human expectations collide with machine limitations. The line endures because it captures the chilling reality that machines may appear capable, but they cannot always be trusted to act in ways humans expect or need.

This installment explores three pillars of Formal Opinion 512: competence, confidentiality, and communication. These pillars focus on what lawyers need to understand about …

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.

A Human Enablement Theory Of Copyright, Akshat Agrawal

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

Copyright policy, designed to protect creators and disseminators from market imperatives, has ironically deepened their market dependency. This transformation stems from two critical theoretical errors: first, the “incentives”/“reward for labour” story that mistakes protection from market pressures for market encouragement; second, market fundamentalism that treats exclusionary rights as natural and as the source of “liberty”. These misconceptions, reinforced by fallacies about pre-social creativity and physicalism, have transformed copyright from an enabler in a market society into one that commodifies creative expression itself, intensifying rather than ameliorating the economic vulnerability of cultural producers.

This theoretical misunderstanding has produced three interlocking harmful …

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.

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

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence For Lawyers: Shall We Play A Game? The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence And The First Cases, Cliff Mckinney

Arkansas Law Notes

In the 1983 movie WarGames, a young computer hacker accidentally accesses a United States military supercomputer programmed to run nuclear war simulations. Four decades after WarGames, lawyers are now facing similar challenges of learning to use and communicate with artificial intelligence––hopefully without destroying the world. Artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are quickly being incorporated into legal practice. These systems can draft documents, perform analysis, and support other legal tasks. While lawyers adjust to these new technologies, courts and regulatory authorities are actively developing appropriate frameworks to guide and supervise the use of these tools within the …

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.

Hallucinated Legal Presentations In Civil Trial Courts, Jeffrey Parness

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Increasingly, hallucinated legal presentations are being discovered and sanctioned in U.S. federal and state civil trial courts. Such presentations encompass papers that are signed, filed, submitted, or advocated, which contain nonexistent legal sources, whether case precedents, statutes, court rules, administrative regulations, or otherwise. These presentations may be discovered by judges, presenting lawyers, opposing lawyers, unrepresented parties, or witnesses.

Ghostwriting The Government, Bridget C.E. Dooling

Marquette Law Review

Ghostwriting is when a writer prepares materials to be issued under someone else’s name. The word describes a politician’s use of a speechwriter, a student’s purchase of a term paper, or a tongue-twisted admirer asking a poet to craft a love letter on his behalf. It also happens inside organizations every day: staff draft documents for others “up the chain” to sign. But when legislators rely on staff and lobbyists to draft bills, when an agency head relies on staff or contractors to write a rule, and when a judge relies on her clerk for a draft opinion, the benefits …

Conditional Admission And The Hazards Of Lawyer Assistance Programs Operating Without Transparency Or Oversight, Paula Schaefer

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Practicing Law From Home During The Pandemic: Findings From The University Of Michigan Law School Alumni Survey, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

The University of Michigan Law School, through its Alumni Survey Project, conducts annual surveys of its graduates regarding their current work and their careers as a whole.  In the surveys conducted in 2022, 2023, and 2024, the Project included questions about the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on various aspects of graduates’ work – their productivity, their co-worker relationships, their client relationships, the balance of their work and family life, and their income – as well as on their work experience overall. 819 graduates who had practiced law fulltime during the pandemic responded to the questions and more than half …

The Ai Advocate: Tracking The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Trial Advocacy, John G. Browning

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

In his annual State of the Judiciary address on December 31, 2023, Chief Justice John G. Roberts chose to focus on the use of generative AI. He cautioned that while AI "has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for lawyers," its use "requires caution and humility" because of the risk of "dehumanizing the law." Chief Justice Roberts' timely warning, made at the height of concerns nationally about lawyers relying on fabricated case citations caused by the "hallucinations" of generative AI, could have just as easily been targeted not only to the legal profession generally, but to trial …

Reimagining Self-Regulation In Sexual Misconduct Complaints: Trust Through Transfer, Allyson M. Mcbride

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

To increase trust in the judiciary’s ability to self-regulate, any formal complaints about a judge should not be handled by a colleague down the hall, but a judge from a different circuit. In this Comment, I propose automatic transfer out of circuit to improve the handling of sexual misconduct complaints specifically. I first describe the different ways judicial conduct is regulated in the federal system. I then discuss the problem of sexual misconduct in the judiciary. Finally, I outline why it is problematic for judges to adjudicate complaints about their intra-circuit colleagues and recommend that all complaints be automatically transferred …

Ai-Powered Lawyering: Ai Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, And The Future Of Legal Practice, Daniel Benjamin 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 …

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 …

Misinformation And The Jury, Gustavo Ribeiro

Indiana Law Journal

This Article bridges critical gaps between the growing body of social science research on misinformation and the persistent challenges jurors face in evaluating potentially unreliable evidence in courtrooms. Misinformation—a pervasive issue undermining decision-making in democratic societies—mirrors the difficulties jurors encounter in distinguishing truth from falsehood amid compelling but unreliable evidence. The consequences of such challenges are dire: wrongful convictions, racial disparities, and the erosion of public trust in the legal system.

This Article is the first piece of legal scholarship to provide a comprehensive discussion of current research on the psychological mechanisms underlying susceptibility to misinformation—such as the illusory truth …

The Most Important Lesson, Rodger D. Citron

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.