AI and ChatGPT Push Students and Faculty to Take a Deeper Look at the Law

As AI continues to overtake almost every sector of modern society, Yale Law School is utilizing this moment to encourage its students to explore the tool’s implications and prepare for an ever-changing technological world and legal landscape. 

In the classroom, students in Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment Jack M. Balkin’s reading group, “Technology Law: From Accidents to AI,” are examining how the introduction of different technologies have shaped the law and legal system throughout time. 

“Our reading group uses history to look at law and technology in the United States, from the first copyright act in 1790 through contemporary developments involving large language models,” said Isaac May ’24, who runs the reading group along with Associate Research Scholar in Law Mikey McGovern under Balkin’s supervision. “Examining the introduction of past technologies such as railroads, the telephone, mass electrification, the radio, and the internet shows how society has dealt with the societal and legal changes they have caused. In each circumstance, the law and the regulatory state adapted to deal with the new circumstance, telling us a lot about the law’s capacity to address technological change.”

May and McGovern take an interdisciplinary approach to their work as resident fellows in the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and they feel it’s important that their reading group study AI through an interdisciplinary lens, as well. 

“We hoped history would offer a different framework for conceiving of AI, one that would raise questions distinct from those that usually come up in discussions at Yale and other institutions,” said May. “Addressing the legal issues around AI requires not just legal knowledge and technical expertise, but also a breadth of learning across many fields, including history.

Both May and McGovern emphasized the importance of integrating the study of AI into the Law School’s curriculum in order to shape lawyers who can address the most pressing and evolving issues of the tech world.

“AI has already transformed society, and Yale Law students will have to address this in legal practice,” said May. “A study released in March found that half of U.S. adults were using large language models, and the AI industry is a growing portion of the U.S. economy. Numerous legal questions about the tech are still unresolved, making this a major focus of contemporary tech law.”

Shah Khan ’27, a member of the reading group, said he came to the Law School to study how the law has historically adapted to what he calls “disruptive technologies” — citing how cars and trains changed the tort systems — to understand how the law might change to accommodate the rise of generative AI. 

“I studied statistics and data science at Yale College, so I had a deep appreciation for how AI models work technically,” said Khan. “But it was not until ChatGPT was released in 2022 that I became concerned with the legal implications behind this technology. These generative AI models consume huge amounts of copyrighted data — was that fair use? What would happen if the model defamed someone? Could a model even defame someone? Using ChatGPT raised so many legal questions that I wanted to think about and help answer.”

Khan has found the academic environment at the Law School to be conducive to his interest in AI and the law. 

“YLS has been a great place to explore this topic because of the incredibly accomplished and thoughtful professors,” said Khan. “Last semester, I led a reading group on AI and the law, and I took a class with a visiting professor on privacy and data governance. In the private law clinic, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how to help plaintiffs bring claims against certain AI companies. And, this semester, I’m participating in the technology law reading group, which traces how novel technologies have changed our legal system — exactly what I came here to study.”

These class discussions are bolstered through extracurricular programs at the Law School, as well. During the fall 2025 term, the Lillian Goldman Law Library sponsored a Critical Legal AI Literacies Series, a speaker series that welcomed scholars from a variety of fields to the Law School to share their critical and alternative perspectives on generative AI and how they relate to law. 

“Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI hype has saturated the legal academy: profit-driven legal tech vendors have visited law schools to make overblown claims about the promise generative AI holds for law, legal research companies have begun to infuse their platforms with ‘AI slop,’ and even some  legal scholars, seemingly anxious about their relevance, have urged rapid adoption,” said Nicholas Mignanelli, assistant director for reference at the Lillian Goldman Law Library and a lecturer in legal research at Yale Law School.

“Unfortunately, concerns about the ethical, social, environmental, and economic implications of large language models have received little attention in the discourse surrounding the use of generative AI in law,” said Mignanelli. 

The series, held from Sept. 9 through Oct. 14, included University of Washington Professor of Linguistics Emily Bender speaking on “Large Language Models and the Lawyer’s Search for Meaning”; University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law Professor Chaz Arnett speaking on “Legal AI and the Permanence of Racism”; American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom Deputy Director Sarah Lamdan speaking on “Data Cartels: The Companies that Control Legal AI”; Trent University Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture & the Environment Anne Pasek speaking on “Legal AI is Trash: The Environmental & Informational Pollution of Machine Learning Tools”; and Yale Divinity Library Director Clifford Anderson speaking on “The Challenges of Synthetic Media.” The program was made possible with the support of the Law School’s Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund. 

“We hope this series will have an impact beyond Yale and plan to make recordings of the talks in this series available to the wider legal field,” said Mignanelli.