In the rush to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into legal education, an inconvenient truth has remained largely unspoken: the AI revolution is being shaped by infrastructures, ideologies, and institutions far removed from the realities of most classrooms in the Global South. While much has been written about cheating and academic integrity in the age of ChatGPT, there has been far less scrutiny of the colonial logic embedded in the very tools that legal educators are being urged to adopt. The result is not merely a digital divide, but a growing epistemic rupture.

At first glance, the adoption of generative AI in legal education appears to promise democratisation. AI tools can summarise cases, generate citations, draft essays, and even simulate client interviews. But a sobering asymmetry lies under this surface. Most of these tools are developed and trained within an environment that has digital literacy, reliable internet access, and sustained investment in legal technology. These datasets are Anglocentric and are built upon the legal corpora that highlight epistemologies and procedural priorities of Euro-American legal cultures.

For law students and educators in Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Kenya, the matter goes beyond mere ease of use; it touches on intellectual autonomy. If an AI model developed using the jurisprudence of the United States or Britain begins shaping a law student’s analysis, which legal system is truly being learned,........

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