UChicago Law's 'Rethinking Legal Education' Strategy — Coordinated Device Ban Across All Nine 1L Courses

For the 2026–2027 academic year, the University of Chicago Law School is piloting a coordinated ban on laptops, tablets and phones across all nine of its core first-year (1L) courses — from Civil Procedure to Transactional Lawyering — as part of a published "AI Strategy Statement" titled "Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era." Exams in these courses will be administered in class without internet or file access; professors may designate a rotating student "scribe" to take electronic notes or allow devices for in-class polling, and the school states it will make disability accommodations as required by law.
In parallel, the school's legal research and writing courses require students to produce a first draft without AI assistance, while permitting AI for research, revision and oral-argument preparation — after which both the written work and the student's AI usage are reviewed. The stated goal is to preserve foundational skills, such as sustained reading, note-taking and argument construction, that faculty argue generative AI risks eroding before students develop them.
Because the policy is new for 2026–2027, no data yet exists on bar-passage rates, writing quality or critical-thinking outcomes under the no-device rule. Legal trade press reports that other law schools are watching the experiment closely, but as of this writing no other institution has adopted an equivalent coordinated, school-wide device policy.

Read the full analysis: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/ai-strategy-statement