First-year law students at the University of Chicago will attend class without phones, tablets, or laptops under a new policy announced Thursday. The law school said the device ban, which applies to freshman-level courses, is part of a curriculum overhaul designed to make legal education more "AI-resilient" and to encourage more deliberate use of technology.
The announcement did not explicitly cite AI cheating as a motive. It arrives amid widespread public concern about generative AI's effects on education and declining literacy and numeracy skills among students. "With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation," the school said in its statement.
Device bans are common in classrooms, but they rarely extend to laptops and are typically enforced at an instructor's discretion rather than as a university-wide policy. The university said the decision followed positive reports from faculty and students after some professors experimented with device bans.
Exams and Oral Defenses Under the New AI Strategy
The laptop ban is one of several measures in Chicago Law's new AI strategy statement. Exams will be taken in class without internet access or apps. Students will also be required to participate in oral discussions with professors about their research papers.
The school is not banning AI outright. Its stated goal is to steer students "toward using AI in ways that promote learning rather than inhibit it," said clinical professor Mark Templeton, a member of Chicago Law's AI Committee, in a statement.
William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, drew a distinction between AI as a study aid and AI as a shortcut. "If you want to use AI as a study partner, if you want to use AI to ingest your notes from class and then create questions to quiz you on the material, that's great," he said in the statement. "That's not a shortcut. There are ways that using AI can strengthen the learning process and that's what we're trying to lean into."
The policy lands against a backdrop of high-profile AI cheating cases at other elite institutions. A Brown University professor recently uncovered what may be the largest AI cheating ring in Ivy League history, suspecting that more than half his students used a chatbot to cheat on an exam. Princeton University recently dropped its century-old Honor Code tradition and began supervising students during exams after suspicions of AI cheating.
Chicago Law's move also follows repeated instances of lawyers submitting court filings containing AI hallucinations, including references to fabricated case law and misattributed quotes. Judges have admonished multiple attorneys for such filings.
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