In Banning AI, Is Berkeley Law Shortchanging Its Students - and Endangering their Future Clients?

UC Berkeley School of Law adopted a highly restrictive student AI policy that takes effect this summer. The policy bars generative AI use for conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit, and prohibits generative AI in exams. Students also may not upload course materials such as assignments, readings, slides, or class recordings into generative AI systems. Permitted research use is limited to identifying sources like cases, statutes, or secondary materials, while students must verify those sources. The policy warns that citations to nonexistent authorities will raise a presumption of prohibited AI use. It lists specific prohibited actions, including brainstorming a thesis, proposing an outline, summarizing legal rules, flagging repetitive passages, and correcting grammar.

"The rule forbids the use of AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit." It also bars students from uploading course materials - assignments, readings, slides, class recordings - into generative AI systems, and limits permitted research use to the narrow task of identifying sources such as cases, statutes or secondary materials."

"Students remain responsible for verifying those sources, and the policy warns that citations to nonexistent authorities "will raise a presumption of prohibited AI use." The policy enumerates banned activities with unusual specificity. Asking a tool to brainstorm a thesis is "prohibited conceptualizing." Proposing an outline is "prohibited outlining." Summarizing a legal rule for a paper is "prohibited drafting.""

""Thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)," the policy states. "This policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default." The policy takes effect this summer and prohibits generative AI outright in any exam."

"A model, he said, "can, in effect, write a research paper soup to nuts," and that capability "required us to rethink students' reliance on them." The school concluded its 2023 AI policy had been "too liberal" given how far generative models had advanced."

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