The University of Chicago Law School is banning artificial intelligence tools from classrooms for all first-year law students, according to reporting by CBS News.
The move places the school among a small but growing number of institutions choosing to restrict rather than embrace AI in core academic settings. For UChicago's law school, the decision targets the first year specifically, a period when students are building foundational legal reasoning skills.
The ban applies to classroom use of AI technology. School officials have framed the policy as a deliberate choice to limit how much the technology shapes the way new law students learn to think and work through legal problems.
The University of Chicago is one of the most selective law schools in the country, and the decision is likely to draw attention from other institutions watching how elite programs handle AI in professional education. Law schools in particular have faced pressure to address how AI tools affect legal writing, research, and analysis, skills that form the core of legal training.
The policy does not appear to extend beyond the first year or beyond the classroom setting, based on available reporting. But the decision to restrict the technology at the entry point of legal education signals a clear institutional position about what first-year students should be doing without AI assistance.
The announcement comes as universities across the country continue to debate how to handle AI in academic settings, with responses ranging from full bans to encouraged use to purpose-built AI tools developed by the institutions themselves.
