Criminal Law Library Blog
Introduction
Two distinguished law professors recently offered incoming law students advice from different but unusually complementary perspectives. Vikram David Amar, writing broadly about the habits of mind and disciplined effort required to succeed in law school, is principally concerned with how students learn to think like lawyers. Michael C. Dorf, focusing more specifically on artificial intelligence, considers how that learning process can be preserved and adapted at a time when AI systems can produce seemingly authoritative answers almost instantly.
Considering their essays together reveals an important relationship that might be less apparent if each were read in isolation. The traditional methods through which law students develop legal reasoning, judgment, and intellectual independence are now encountering technologies capable of retrieving information, summarizing complex material, and generating plausible responses with remarkable speed. The question is therefore not simply whether students should use AI, but how they can take advantage of useful technological tools without allowing those tools to displace the intellectual work that legal education is intended to cultivate.
For law students and educators, that question has immediate practical importance. But it also reaches beyond the classroom to practicing lawyers, librarians, researchers, and general readers interested in how artificial intelligence may be changing education and professional life. Read together, the essays by Professors Amar and Dorf offer something approaching a contemporary philosophy of legal education: technology may assist the process of learning to think like a lawyer, but it should not become a substitute for learning how to think.
The two professors approach that larger question from different directions. Amar begins with the enduring habits and attitudes students need to succeed in law school; Dorf examines what happens to that learning process when generative AI enters the classroom, the research process, and eventually professional practice.
Amar: Learning How to Think
In his July 31, 2026, Justia Verdict column, “Top Six Pieces of Friendly (Though Perhaps in Some Instances Tough) Advice for Incoming Law Students,” Professor Vikram David Amar offers six recommendations drawn from his experience as a law professor and former law school dean.
His advice emphasizes habits rather than shortcuts. Students should recognize that law school is a serious academic undertaking requiring sustained work; become comfortable with the fact that legal questions frequently lack a single indisputably correct answer; learn from conversations with classmates; engage seriously with people whose ideological perspectives differ from their own; allocate their time and effort intelligently; and become active rather than passive readers.
Underlying these recommendations is an important conception of legal education. Law is not merely a body of rules to memorize. Lawyers routinely work in environments in which statutes, precedents, facts, and competing principles permit more than one plausible interpretation. The lawyer’s contribution often consists precisely in identifying those possibilities, evaluating them, and constructing the strongest argument from among them.
For that reason, Amar cautions against habits carried over from earlier educational experiences that encourage students simply to search for the “right answer.” The uncertainty that initially frustrates law students is often the very environment in which legal reasoning operates.
Artificial intelligence adds a new dimension to that temptation. A chatbot can produce an answer quickly and confidently. But obtaining an answer is not necessarily equivalent to understanding why the answer is persuasive, or recognizing why another answer might also be plausible.
That observation provides a natural bridge to Professor Dorf’s more focused consideration of artificial intelligence and legal education.
Dorf: AI as a Tool Rather Than a Substitute
Professor Michael C. Dorf addresses that problem directly in his August 5, 2026, Justia Verdict essay, “Advice About AI for New Law Students.”
His discussion begins with a practical matter: students need to understand and comply with the AI policies of their law schools and individual professors. Using AI where it is prohibited can raise academic-integrity concerns, just as inappropriate reliance upon AI in professional practice can ultimately create obligations and risks involving courts, colleagues, and clients.
But Dorf’s larger concern goes beyond rule compliance.
Law students should resist using AI to avoid the difficult intellectual work that legal education is designed to cultivate. The Socratic method, classroom questioning, case analysis, and preparation for examinations are not merely obstacles standing between students and answers. They are methods for developing legal judgment.
If a chatbot performs that reasoning before the student has struggled with the question independently, the technology may inadvertently deprive the student of precisely the experience law school is intended to provide.
Dorf nevertheless does not suggest that students simply ignore artificial intelligence. AI tools are increasingly relevant to legal research and professional practice. Students therefore need to learn how to use them responsibly, including understanding their limitations.
One principle is particularly important: AI generated legal research must be independently verified. Generative systems can produce inaccurate propositions, nonexistent authorities, incorrect quotations, or misleading characterizations of actual cases. The professional responsibility for the resulting work remains with the lawyer, not the technology that assisted in producing it.
Dorf also counsels patience toward law professors and institutions. Legal education itself is adjusting to technologies whose capabilities and implications are changing rapidly. Rules and teaching practices will therefore continue to evolve.
Where Amar and Dorf Converge
Although the two professors begin from different starting points, their advice converges around several fundamental principles.
Both emphasize intellectual engagement. Amar urges students to read actively, discuss ideas seriously, and wrestle with ambiguity. Dorf warns against allowing AI to eliminate that intellectual struggle.
Both emphasize independent judgment. Amar reminds students that legal problems frequently permit competing arguments. Dorf reminds them that an AI-generated response cannot relieve a future lawyer of responsibility for evaluating whether an argument or authority is sound.
Both also implicitly distinguish information from professional judgment. Technology can increasingly retrieve, organize, summarize, and even analyze information. But lawyers must determine which facts matter, which authorities control, which arguments are persuasive, and how competing considerations should be weighed.
This distinction may become increasingly important as AI systems improve. The ability to obtain information quickly does not eliminate the need to determine whether that information is accurate, relevant, authoritative, or persuasive. In that respect, technological proficiency and traditional legal reasoning should not be viewed as competing skills. Properly understood, each can reinforce the other.
A Larger Lesson for Legal Education
Taken together, Amar and Dorf raise a question extending beyond the incoming law school class of 2026: What should law schools be teaching when machines can increasingly perform tasks once regarded as evidence of legal knowledge?
One possible answer emerges from reading the two essays together.
The more readily technology can generate information and proposed answers, the more important it may become for legal education to emphasize judgment, skepticism, interpretation, argument, verification, and intellectual independence.
The objective should therefore not necessarily be to choose between traditional legal education and artificial intelligence. Rather, it should be to determine where technology genuinely strengthens legal learning and where it risks short circuiting the development of capabilities students will later need as lawyers.
For incoming students, the immediate lesson is comparatively straightforward: work hard, read carefully, engage with classmates and professors, become comfortable with uncertainty, question easy answers, and use AI as an aid to thinking rather than as a replacement for thinking.
Those habits were valuable before generative AI arrived. The observations of Professors Amar and Dorf suggest that they may be even more important now.
Why Researchers, Including Law Librarians, Should Care
The issues raised by Professors Amar and Dorf extend well beyond law students and legal education. Researchers, including law librarians, increasingly work in an environment in which AI can locate, summarize, organize, and generate information with remarkable speed. Yet greater speed and convenience do not diminish the need to evaluate the accuracy, authority, context, and relevance of the information produced. If anything, they make those responsibilities more important.
The professors’ complementary messages therefore have particular significance for researchers. Amar’s emphasis on active reading, intellectual engagement, and comfort with ambiguity reinforces the importance of critical inquiry. Dorf’s cautions about AI generated legal research underscore the continuing necessity of independent verification and careful evaluation of sources. For law librarians, these principles are closely connected to longstanding professional responsibilities for identifying authoritative information, teaching effective research practices, and helping others evaluate and use legal information responsibly.
AI may change important aspects of how research is conducted, but it does not eliminate the fundamental qualities on which reliable research depends: curiosity, skepticism, careful evaluation, verification, and informed human judgment. Indeed, as AI-generated information becomes easier to obtain, the ability to distinguish between information that is merely plausible and information that is reliable and authoritative may become even more important.
In that sense, the lessons Amar and Dorf offer incoming law students reach beyond the law school classroom. They also speak to those who help lawyers, scholars, students, and other researchers navigate an increasingly AI-assisted information environment, one in which technological capability and human judgment will need to work together rather than substitute for one another.
This overview is intended to bring the complementary themes of the two essays together rather than to reproduce the full arguments of either author. Readers are therefore encouraged to consult the original essays for Professors Amar’s and Dorf’s complete arguments, qualifications, examples, and recommendations.
Primary Sources
Vikram David Amar, Top Six Pieces of Friendly (Though Perhaps in Some Instances Tough) Advice for Incoming Law Students, Justia Verdict, July 31, 2026.
Read Professor Amar’s original essay at Justia Verdict
Michael C. Dorf, Advice About AI for New Law Students, Justia Verdict, August 5, 2026.