The End of Legal Scholarship?
Crisis claims, especially around disruptive technological innovation, tend to sell well, but are often overstated. This is true in general (the e-reader, which used to be a thing, before tablets and smart phones, was not the end of printed books), and in the practice of law (AI has not ended lawyering and the legal profession), notwithstanding popular assertions to the contrary. A new article prompted by Dean Andrew Perlman and written by Anthropic’s large language model Claude claims AI has just about ended or forever changed legal scholarship as we know it. And it may not be overstating things.
In December 2024, Andy Perlman prompted ChatGPT to write an article about Generative AI and the future of legal scholarship. The result was striking. Although the work product read more like an outline than an article and was not very interesting, it established that AI could (almost) write a law review article. In June 2026 Dean Perlman repeated the exercise, finding that “the output appears considerably more impressive. . . [T]he quality of the ideas and prose are, in my opinion, far stronger than the prior effort.” (P. 1.) Continue reading "The End of Legal Scholarship?"
