Legal Profession
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How often is AI being used to write (some or all of) law review articles in top law reviews in 2026?
Julian Nyarko took a look. From his summation of his findings (using Pangram, whose reliability he describes): In 2025, AI use was rare: 9 out of 273 articles (3.3%) have any AI signal, with 5 articles (1.8%) containing an estimated share of AI-generated words exceeding 5%. The estimated share of AI written words across all…
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Trump Administration targets ABA’s role as an “accreditor” of law schools
CHE reports: A report from the Education Department is recommending that the accrediting arm of the American Bar Association lose its federal recognition. If approved, the accrediting agency, called the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, would no longer be eligible to serve as a gatekeeper of federal financial…
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Illinois Institute of Technology declares “financial exigency” and begins firing faculty, including tenured faculty
Up to one-third of the faculty may be terminated, although in the law school, Chicago-Kent, it appears the number is lower (maybe one-fifth by some accounts). If readers have more details, please email me. The main source of the budgetary crisis is the decline in the enrollment of international students, no doubt due to Trump…
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Dear AALS: a suggestion for the FAR form
In the choices of positions for those currently in law teaching positions (e.g., “Professor,” “Lecturer” etc.), there is no provision for those who are “teaching” professors or “professors from practice” (or “professor of the practice”), which are increasingly common titles. Please think about adding those! Currently, I advise candidates to choose the closest title (e.g.,…
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Lawyers behaving badly…with AI…
…on both sides of a case! All were sanctioned by the court. And one of them is a repeat offender who has been sanctioned before for this in another court. Oy veh.
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For Class of 2025, total jobs and BigLaw jobs both declined
Lawprof Derek Muller (Notre Dame) looks at the latest ABA data.
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The American Bar Association needs to investigate Texas Tech Law School for violating the First Amendment rights of a student
A Texas Tech Law alum writes: Texas Tech, as you might know, is in the forefront of demolishing any semblance of academic freedom. Their new system Chancellor (Brandon Creighton) is the former state legislator who authored SB17, the legislation that outlawed DEI, requires Regent review of syllabi, and loosens tenure protections. A Texas Tech School…
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University of Kentucky chooses federal district judge as its new Dean…
…despite the opposition of a “substantial majority” of the faculty. Oddly, a Kentucky spokesperson suggests that the judge’s opinions constitute his record of “scholarship.”
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Trends in major gifts to law schools
Some interesting data from lawprof Sloan Speck (Colorado). Professor Speck references an earlier post of mine about whether “transformative” gifts really transform. It’s not clear to me that any of them “transformed” any of the affected schools. (Penn is ranked higher now in the silly USNews.com, but that’s due to a change in the formula…
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Someone once described SCOTUS as a “super-legislature”…
…and the recent NYT expose about the origin of SCOTUS’s “shadow docket” suggests he was right. As one reader put it to me in an email about the NYT article: Ultimate vindication of your “super legislature” moniker. Nothing in the story is particularly surprising, but it does establish that what we call the “shadow docket”…
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Speaking of the legal job market…
…no indication yet that AI is affecting hiring by large law firms.
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Is a law degree “worth” the cost in terms of return-on-investment?
The answer is still “emphatically” yes. Lawprof Sloan Speck reviews some recent research on the topic; an excerpt: Among eighteen graduate degrees, law provided the third-highest return to earnings (59%) and cost-adjusted returns (41%). Only medicine and pharmacy provided higher returns. Similar patterns held for gains in net present earnings (41% for law) and internal rate of return (22%).…
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Even judges cannot figure out whether lawyers are incompetent or using AI!
Philosophy graduate student Charles Bakker sends me this interesting article from Canada about an “Ontario lawyer [who] filed seven completely fake quotations from court cases to a judge while arguing in court, but claims it was human error and not artificial intelligence tools behind it. A skeptical judge wonders if the lawyer’s claim makes things…
21. Is style the last refuge against AI?