In the Phaedrus, Plato tells us that Socrates feared the written word. He believed that committing knowledge to text would weaken memory and discourage dialogue. Writing, he warned, was inferior to debate because it could not answer back. It would only cause the appearance of wisdom, not wisdom itself.
The parallel to AI is almost too obvious. We now have systems that can draft, summarize, argue, code, and draw at a speed and with a breadth of knowledge that no human can match. They make us feel competent and informed without having first confronted the uncomfortable friction that comes with any learning process. The danger is not that AI thinks, but that it makes it so tempting for us to stop thinking.
Yet the story of writing offers a counterpoint. As writing became more central to education, debate was not abandoned. What made debate valuable was indeed preserved, so much so that we still use the Socratic method in education – and particularly in law school – to this day, because we know that live questioning teaches students to think on their feet and develops judgment in ways that no text can. At the same time, we learned new forms of thought. Silent reading, once unusual, became second nature. We learned to reason inwardly and to enter into a conversation with written text that has allowed us to continue to engage with Socrates even today.
In other words, we did not choose between speech and text. We expanded our ways of thinking, and we became better thinkers.
We now stand at a similar threshold with artificial intelligence. Just as literacy became foundational to participating in society, AI literacy is becoming essential to participating in law, public life, and democratic decision-making. A law graduate who enters the legal profession without the ability to understand and work critically with AI, to question its assumptions and navigate its ethical boundaries, will be as unprepared as a lawyer who cannot read. A legal education that excludes AI is incomplete.
If legal education does not adapt, we risk creating a lost generation of students taught with pre-AI methods for a post-AI world. The way they think, learn, and write will have been shaped by AI long before they reach our classrooms, and the profession they join will expect them to use these tools critically and responsibly. Ignoring AI will not make our students better thinkers. It will leave them disengaged, frustrated, and underprepared.
This is not just about career outcomes for our students, as important as that may be. The cost of our inaction is not just for our graduates. Law touches our everyday lives, often quietly, but pervasively, and when technology changes how society works, the law has to adapt. It is our students who, as future lawyers, judges, policymakers, or law professors, will have to translate those changes into fair rules. If we don’t prepare them for that, the gap will show up everywhere else.
So, what should legal education do? It is not enough to add a course or issue a policy. It is definitely not enough to put on blinders and prohibit the use of AI. The challenge is deeper. We need to double down on the foundational and simultaneously evolve with the new. This is not a choice between tradition and novelty; it is a matter of balance.
We should double down on what makes us human: intellectual curiosity, a sense of purpose, creativity, the impulse to question and to critique. These matter more when AI can do most of the work.
When almost everyone has access to systems that can write a brief, summarize a case, or sketch an argument, the essential questions change. What will students choose to do with that capacity? What questions will they decide to ask? Which problems will they care enough to pursue beyond the good enough answer?
AI cannot decide any of this. It cannot, and should not, provide students with their motivations or priorities. The ability to want what we want, to form our own purposes and pursue our own goals, remains the core of our human agency.
But at the same time, we must evolve. If we are serious about integrating AI in a way that strengthens, rather than weakens, our students, at least five shifts are needed.
- First, we must educate ourselves.
Faculty and academic leaders must understand AI both at a functional and at a conceptual level: what these tools are, how they operate, the challenges they create, and how we might use them both to teach law and to practice it better. We cannot teach what we do not understand.
- All students must take AI literacy courses.
AI literacy is not optional, least of all in law school. It should be universal, rigorous, and foundational. Students must learn how the law interacts with technology and society. They also need to know how AI systems reason and why they fail, how they influence reasoning and judgment, and what responsible use looks like in practice, both in their daily lives and professionally. Students should not be made to depend on answers that are available to them but that they cannot judge.
- We must create space for simulation, reflection, and metacognition.
Students need environments where they can work with AI openly to simulate the way law is practiced today. They need to experiment with tools, but also to analyze outputs, identify errors, and reflect on their own thinking as part of the learning process. This requires access to tools, curricular time, and structured practice.
- We must decide where AI should not be used.
We need to be deliberate about creating tasks that prevent cognitive offloading and the subsequent erosion of human intelligence. We need to preserve memory and attention, the act of deep reading, reason, critical thinking, and ethical framing. We must strengthen our skills courses and ensure students learn to perform basic lawyering tasks without AI assistance: spotting issues, applying precedents, identifying and mitigating risks, and advocating for a party.
- We must change the way we teach so that we raise the intellectual level of what we ask students to do.
We need to change our assignments and exams, and what we do with students when they are in the classroom. If AI can handle specific tasks, then those tasks can no longer be the endpoint of learning. It is important that students learn to operate at the interpretive, strategic, and ethical layers of legal thought. That must be woven into the methodology, not sprinkled on top as an afterthought. It is our duty to change. And we must change because the profession is changing, and we owe it to our students to prepare them for the world they will soon confront, not the one we, the educators, grew up in.
The written word did not diminish our capacities; it transformed them. Humans adapt. That is our genius. And once again, it is time to use it.
© IE Insights.
