The classroom is no longer an analogue haven. At a time when generative AI can write essays, summarise case law, and imitate legal reasoning with fluency, the legal academy responds not by seeking reform but by resorting to regulation. Its reactions have been immediate, punitive, and largely superficial. Universities are hastily updating academic codes of conduct, deploying detection tools like Turnitin, and routinely issuing warnings of disciplinary consequences for students who rely on AI.

However, plagiarism is not the problem. The real crisis lies in how legal education is failing to confront the impact of AI on legal reasoning itself. Law schools have seized on misconduct detection as a proxy metric for ethics, viewing AI as a crisis to be policed rather than a pedagogical inflection point in need of thoughtful reform. The deeper shifts in cognition, professional identity, and institutional responsibility have been left unaddressed.

Generative AI is not just a tool that students utilise to evade effort. It is becoming an epistemic agent within the learning process. The outsourcing of case analysis to language models trained on statistical probabilities rather than jurisprudential principles results in a loss of critical thinking ability and judgment. The law is interpretative and contextual; however, learners are being conditioned to think of law as an automated output. Fluency is being........

© Courting The Law