BLS Office Hours: Associate Dean Chris Beauchamp Leads Brooklyn Law School’s Nuanced Approach to AI
Professor Christopher Beauchamp, a historian of technology and intellectual property and Brooklyn Law School’s newly appointed Associate Dean for Technology and Innovation, studies and writes about how innovation has shaped society across centuries. Beauchamp is leveraging this big-picture view of evolving technology to help the Law School address the sweeping changes that artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing to both the profession of law and legal education.
Dean David D. Meyer announced Beauchamp’s appointment as Associate Dean last August, building on the work of an AI task force composed of faculty, staff, and administrators. Helmed by Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Library Brittany Persson ’07 (who has been exploring AI usage since ChatGPT launched in 2022), the group has been working for more than a year to develop a comprehensive strategy for the law school’s approach to AI in the classroom, research, and administrative operations, including an AI mission statement and a new student AI use policy.
In an interview, Beauchamp, who joined the faculty in 2011 and is working on a book titled Technology’s Trials, described his vision for building on that work in his new role and what AI will mean for students and the school community in the years ahead.
The Associate Dean of Technology and Innovation is a new role whose creation was recommended by the Law School’s Long-Range Planning Committee, which you were a member of. What will this deanship look like, and how does it tie into your work?
My professional life has been much more about looking back than looking ahead. That said, as a historian of technology and intellectual property, my work has been about change and how people adapt to new technology through one industrial revolution after another. In this position, part of my job will be to step back and think about the bigger picture. Right now, the range of possible outcomes for what lawyering will look like in 10 or 20 years is wide. This means preparing people for change: Our students must be able to manage change, and we as faculty, staff, and administrators have to build and model that capacity as well. With so much in flux, it’s a great time to go back to basics and to think about the core of what lawyers do and what law schools do.
How does Brooklyn Law School’s mission statement on AI position the school regarding the technology?
Our mission statement sets out our commitment to educating and training students for the world that they are really going into as lawyers. We want to help our students become educated and critical users of AI, who are not just using the tools where it's appropriate but are doing so ethically and responsibly. We also want them to think about how they as lawyers can shape the world of law with AI in it. Lawyers are one of the groups in society that can, should, and hopefully will have influence on how AI is used. AI potentially opens so many new avenues for change in our institutions and economies. Lawyers, like our graduates, have a role to play in ensuring that those changes are governed by the rule of law and lead to just outcomes.
How will Brooklyn Law School be regulating AI use? Some law schools have implemented across-the-board AI bans, and others have banned the use of devices in the first-year classroom.
Those schools are thinking about how to keep certain spaces AI-free, and we think about that, too. It is our responsibility as a law school to say, here is what AI is good for, here's what it's less good for, here's how to use it, how not to use it, and how to make those choices for yourself in an informed way. If a school just enacts a blanket ban, it risks alienating a lot of students who have used AI before and know some of the benefits it can bring to them as learners.
AI can definitely be detrimental for learning, but it has different effects on people at different stages. Experienced professionals and advanced students, who know what they are trying to do and have a good idea of how to do it, can find AI incredibly useful for streamlining workflow, making things efficient, and polishing their outputs. But when you are new at something, AI is a very double-edged sword. Humans learn through experience, including the experience of making mistakes and struggling with tasks they don’t yet know how to perform. There is a learning process in the experience of doing a shaky job the first time around, and then a better job, and then a better job after that, by taking and using feedback. AI offers a tempting short-cut to reach the end result without the learning. So, I understand why some schools keep AI at arm’s length.
At the same time, AI can be a powerful learning tool. It can give learners access to collected knowledge and advice on a level we have never known before. If we are telling our students that they can never access that tool even for its beneficial uses, that doesn't help our students, and it erodes the trust that they have in us as educators. On the institution-wide level, our AI use policy draws a distinction between the kinds of AI that are most useful in learning, and the others. So, there will be parts of the law school experience that are kept as AI-free spaces, especially in first-year courses. To the extent that we do bring AI into the classroom and curriculum, we aim to do it in a thoughtful and intentional way. And it obviously affects how we do assessments: take-home exams are much less useful in the age of AI.
In what ways should students be using AI as a learning tool?
We see students seeing AI for augmented learning. That means they should use it to practice, explore, consolidate, and help reinforce ideas and concepts that they have already studied in class. Sometimes, students complete all the practice questions and they want more. Or they have a great question about what they’ve learned, and they want to explore a bit further. At that point, they may want to use AI to organize notes, or create practice questions, or to locate sources for further research.
How are students learning about the new AI policies and what role did they play in their creation?
We discussed the student use policy over the summer with student leaders and with some students who are experienced AI users. They were incredibly helpful and supportive—especially on the need to have policies that are transparent, consistent, and regularly reviewed and updated—and their ideas and reactions greatly improved the final policy. The vice dean sent the AI policy to students at the start of the semester, and we’ll be doing some more student-facing outreach during the year.
Faculty also have their own individual course-level AI policies, which are often tailored to the type of class they’re teaching and the students who take it. There is a significant difference, for example, between first-year classes and upper-level classes, in terms of students’ need to establish fundamental skills before introducing AI tools. Approaches can also vary a lot by the subject matter of the class. In patent law, which I teach, lawyers are early and heavy adopters of AI, so I bring what I’m learning from practitioners about their AI use back into the classroom. By trying different things in class, my colleagues and I are able to learn from our students’ responses and ideas, which we can then draw on to inform the law school’s overall approach.
There are many headlines about AI replacing workers, and even discussion within the industry of regulating AI to prevent it from going rogue. How do you see AI impacting the legal profession in the long term?
I think AI can be transformative in areas where there is currently a lot of scarcity or bottleneck areas. There are huge backlogs in the courts and in administrative agencies. There are areas like criminal defense or housing defense where there is not enough legal representation and where you would love to see 50 times as many lawyers representing clients. Depending on how AI technology develops, we could see lawyers in those areas being able to reach and help many more clients. In other areas, it’s hard to know how changing productivity will affect legal business models. Clients may want a lot of things that law firms do to be automated and thus cheaper, and there is going to be an ongoing back and forth between large clients and large legal providers about what their legal services look like.
How well-positioned is Brooklyn Law School for the changes that will come about through AI?
We are well-positioned in that experiential education has long been one of our crown jewels. BLS was a pioneer in clinical legal education and our clinics are still some of the most impressive in the country. We have an incredible externship program built up over the years, which benefits a lot from our location, the scale of the BLS alumni base, and our deep relationships in the New York legal community. I don’t believe that classroom learning is necessarily going to get less important, but experiential learning will be more valuable than ever as something that students can't get from an AI interface. Legal education is also going to place much more emphasis on community in the next decade or so. People generally learn best in groups, and learning together enables lawyers-in-training to build peer relationships and professional and ethical norms. Working together is also essential for developing crucial professional skills like leading teams, listening to others, and being able to explain the law face-to-face. Those will all be part of a lawyer’s value in a world with AI, and so they will be central to the future of law schools as well.