Higher Education Existentialism

On Not Following the Script

Emma Thompson as Karen Eiffel in “Stranger Than Fiction” (2006)

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

The 2026 World Cup finals may have seized the romantic imaginations of billions of people around the world right now (including mine), but the serious work continues, too.

Not that the World Cup isn’t serious work.

Nevertheless:

I am reproducing here three posts that I published the other day at one of my other social media venues, a blog (yes, an actual blog, still) that serves US legal education. “TaxProf Blog” is more and less than the title suggests. It was founded and for many years edited by a tax law professor and dean of the law school at Pepperdine University, Paul Caron, and it focused mostly on tax law (no surprise) and occasionally on larger topics connected to US legal education. Late last Fall, Paul stepped back from his primary leadership role on the blog. The AALS - Association of American Law Schools - took over hosting and publishing; I was invited to join a small roster of new contributors, to focus on legal education.

My posts there largely dig at the complacency of US law schools, for reasons that I explored at length in earlier public (but mostly unpublished) essays. [One] [Two] My view is largely that the strategic, economic, programmatic, and day-to-day challenges facing US law schools (including deans and faculties within the schools, and the provosts and parent universities of which most law schools are parts) are micro versions of the strategic, economic, programmatic, and day-to-day challenges facing US universities. Talking about legal education relates directly to my day job, but it is also my gateway into the larger “what’s the future of higher education?” and “what’s the future of the university?” questions that circulate on Substack, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, the pages of what’s left of elite media, the occasional monograph, and some other places.

“Generative AI,” in its many manifestations, is not itself the cause (or cure) for law schools’ complacency, but Generative AI exposes it more clearly and directly than almost any other socioeconomic or sociotechnical development that I can think of going, back to my start as a law student in 1984. That complacency spans not just legal education, of course. It cuts across vast swaths of the legal profession. Lawyers of many sorts and stripes, law professors, law deans … almost all of them are playing their parts in what they think of as a perfectly normal narrative of law and justice, “the rule of law” meets expert, exclusive, elite careers, a story that is changing and evolving through time more or less as law and justice and the institutions that embody those concepts have changed and evolved durably for the last 150 years.

My header image today goes to that persistent normalcy. It is from the great “Stranger Than Fiction,” a film with Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell as author and subject who discover and who overcome (because this is Hollywood) the existential questions lurking beneath the narrative.

And I am reproducing the posts because I continue to be reminded of just how siloed the (social) media-verse is. My TaxProf Blog posts seem to speak to a tiny slice of the legal education professoriate and to a slightly larger but still far from comprehensive slice of legal education leadership. Basically, over there I am writing for a small number of curious law school deans and former deans. Here, the audience may be little larger, but it is a different crew - people who may be less interested in legal education perhaps but who may share my interest in connecting the legal ed-meets-higher ed dots.

With that preface:

Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1

News from Austin: Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas (UT) School of Law circulated a long-ish memo the other day that lays out a mostly clear-eyed, common-sense view of how artificial intelligence technologies and systems ought to be folded into the legal education program at that law school. Here at TaxProf, Kevin Johnson had the news right away, together with a link to a praiseworthy comment from Seth Chandler.

I have a couple of notes.

Note one:

The memo affirms that UT is steering in the direction of a thoughtful, full-bore critical embrace of AI for students, faculty, staff, and graduates. That’s the common sense part A. And the memo also affirms that certain features of legal education as we (the faculty in particular) have come to know it and practice it are affected by AI … in ways yet to be sussed out. That’s the common sense part B. And those may not be sussed out easily or quickly. Paraphrasing (see the memo at p. 5) and borrowing from Seth Chandler’s summary:

[Chesney] starts from the lawyer capabilities AI, he asserts, cannot supply: rigorous analysis, deep command of the conceptual structure of a body of law, discernment, persuasion in live and high-stakes settings, and judgment under genuine uncertainty. He is probably right, at least for 2026. He then asks whether ubiquitous AI threatens a school’s ability to build those, and reaches for the right history.

Chandler’s comment – “He is probably right, at least for 2026” – gets at:

Note two:

U.S. law schools, and perhaps law schools and law faculties elsewhere, are still tiptoeing around AI as if it is an uninvited guest that is threatening to spoil the party. Dean Chesney’s memo, thoughtful as it is, reads to me like a great lawyer’s effort to express his and his faculty’s navigating around a problem rather than wrestling with its deep structure. The list of “lawyer capabilities” in the memo (again, see p. 5), which are listed under the heading “educational rigor,” sound to me like the ambitions that made 20th century legal education great, and robust, and enduring, for many if not all of the people and institutions that it touched, including those it excluded.

What about the 21st century?

What if artificial intelligence is an existential challenge to current systems of training lawyers, rather than a moment in technological evolution that calls for institutional resilience and adaptation?

That is the subject of Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2, yet to come.

Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2

In Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1, … I asked out loud: “What if artificial intelligence is an existential challenge to current systems of training lawyers, rather than a moment in technological evolution that calls for institutional resilience and adaptation?”

I’ll be honest up front. I have my suspicions and my biases, but I do not and cannot know whether or not AI is an existential challenge. Instead I introduce you to Professor Michael Plaxton, at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, who is clearly thinking along the same lines and who lays out the question sharply and elaborately.

More below the jump.

In a recent Substack essay titled “To Our Next Law Dean: How will you justify our existence?,” Professor Paxton writes:

[A]ll of the things that law schools can effectively teach at scale – i.e., to a large number of fee-paying students at once, thereby making content-delivery practically achievable – are things that high-quality legal AI can already do or will be able to do better and much more efficiently than many or most of the law students we graduate. Insofar as what we are teaching is sufficiently general that it can be – and has been – delivered in a more or less standardized fashion across a range of casebooks and textbooks and across a range of law schools, it is something that AI can also assimilate and deliver with vastly greater efficiency.

That is surely right.

And

[A]ll of the things that people will want human lawyers for – human judgment, human relationships, human accountability – are things that law schools cannot effectively teach at scale. For the knowledge that AI cannot assimilate pertains to matters that are not general; that are profoundly local in some sense. The knowledge might be local to an extremely niche sub-sub-sub-field of law, involving a very small number of repeat players. Preparing students for that field of law involves familiarity with the highly bespoke practical and legal problems faced by participants in that specific context, and may also involve acquiring some familiarity with the participants so that one can understand why and how certain legal solutions are attractive to them.

Right again, in my opinion.

So: what about AI? Observe the unintended echo here of part of Dean Bobby Chesney’s recent memo about AI at the University of Texas School of Law:

What about just doing what we have always done, but doing it better, more rigorously? Continuing to focus on the teaching of general legal doctrines, concepts, methods, techniques, but insisting that students learn them at an exceedingly high level – such that every law graduate could critically assess the output of an AI-generated brief or memorandum? Perhaps that kind of high-level mastery would amount to a kind of local knowledge. Maybe. But even if it does, that kind of mastery cannot be delivered in anything like the way we deliver legal education at present. It cannot be massified.

Though it is not a popular thing to say, we know full well that most law students do not have a deep understanding of the material we teach; many lack even a superficial understanding. To provide the sort of deep understanding of the law that will be in demand would require vastly more intense, curated, one-to-one, ongoing mentoring, with iterative assessment on every topic. A single professor could not possibly do this with every student we currently enroll. It would not be scalable and we know it.

And so:

“If AI can do all the things we are capable of teaching, and law schools are not capable of teaching much (if anything) else, then what is the case for law schools? … Perhaps there is room for optimism. [Here he links to a Substack post from the former Dean of Northwestern Law and former AALS President Dan Rodriguez] I don’t want my next dean to indulge in despair. But a would-be dean who tells me I have nothing to worry about – well, I can’t take that person seriously.”

Next and last for today: where does existential thinking take the collective “us”?

Legal Education Existentialism, No. 3

Today’s “Legal Education Existentialism” series started with some reflections on Dean Bobby Chesney’s recent memo about AI at Texas Law and continued by expanding its reach to question the basic purposes and structures of contemporary legal education as a whole. Is legal education entering an existential moment?

In this last post today I pull back the lens even further by linking to a recent essay by Jordan Furlong, the Canada-based consultant and journalist and one of the most thoughtful people I know among observers of the “law industry.” The essay is titled, “The unbundling of lawyer institutions: AI will strip law firms and law schools of their commodity features. Their future depends on whether they can rebuild around their highest-value functions and their trust-bearing core.”

My notes, below the jump.

He builds in part on Professor Paxton’s critique of legal education, highlighted in my second “Existentialism” post today, and also on a recent piece by Nicola (Nikki) Shaver, a highly-regarded legal profession consultant based in the UK, titled, “Law Firms Want to Change; They Just Can’t.”

Furlong writes:

Legal intelligence — the capacity to apply legal knowledge to analyze legal issues, create legal instruments, and solve legal problems — is valuable not only because of its utility, but also because of its scarcity. Back in first-year law school, when our professors promised they’d teach us to “think like a lawyer,” they were also saying we’d become members of the exclusive class of people equipped and authorized to exercise that capacity — and therefore, one of the few reliable conduits through which legal assistance could flow. That rare ability would command a premium price.

Equally valuable, therefore, was any institution that could organize scarce legal knowledge and transmit scarce legal intelligence to novice learners at scale — which is where law schools have traditionally derived much of their economic value and their ability to charge what they do. And so was any institution that could organize the work of credentialed lawyers to solve legal problems and deliver legal outcomes to clients at scale, which is where law firms derive much of their economic value and their ability to charge eye-watering fees.

But scarcity was the key. In current parlance, the average person’s inability to organize and command legal intelligence to solve their problems enabled the “moat” that protected law schools and law firms. Accordingly, if legal intelligence were to become widely accessible — if, say, a machine could help learners acquire legal intelligence, or could mimic it to provide legal information, documentation, and direction to legal solution seekers — then both law firms and law schools would have a problem. And here we are.

From “scarce” resources – talent, expertise, intelligence – to “abundance” is a little overdetermined, as academics might say, and Furlong recognizes that. Let us say that those resources are being produced and allocated in all sorts of new ways. If “unbundling” the functions of legal services organizations (including law firms) and law schools is one institutional response to new production and allocation systems (and a response that has popped up from time to time across all professions, professional sectors, and all of higher education) then what remains for the system of existing institutions?

That is Furlong’s version of Legal Education Existentialism.

His response:

In both law firms and law schools, therefore, the scarcest and most valuable assets are great people and great reputations. In a real sense, each of these assets enables and reinforces the other. And what both these assets share in common is one thing: They engender trust. And now we come to the heart of the matter.

A functioning society needs reliable repositories of trust. We don’t all know each other and we don’t necessarily all like each other, so we need recognized institutions in which we can collectively deposit enough trust to enable our daily transactions. We need repositories whose foundations and standards and safeguards are so strong that they justify our confidence; we can count on them and on what they provide. Houses need load-bearing walls; societies need trust-bearing institutions.

Law schools and law firms have always been the legal profession’s trust-bearing institutions. AI is going to unbundle each of their individual functions and deliverables, stripping the value from any whose commodity status AI has revealed or enabled. That might sound like a pretty dire forecast.

There’s more at work here than the economics of efficiency, however. The human need for trusted legal institutions is real, and it will survive the impact of AI. But these institutions have to recognize and accept the surgery they’re about to undergo — the removal of their commodity elements — and make plans for how they will recover, adapt, and flourish afterwards.

Here is my note:

I am not sold. I buy the idea of institutional repositories of trust, which covers both functional and reputational dimensions. But as a society, over centuries and especially over the last decades we have learned to trust machines and technologies and to build regulatory systems and forms of community engagement to mitigate risks and constrain spillovers when “trust” seems to extend too far. I am not a critic of “trust,” but I do not think that legal education existentialism can be managed using a “trust” toolkit.

Where I would begin, instead, is with a suite of values and value that Michael Paxton highlighted (but briefly) as part of his letter to a dean: “There will, I suspect, always be a place for human judgment, human contact, human relationships, and human accountability.” Law schools for a century have been organized around scarcity (as Jordan Furlong writes) and around a very specific cluster of forms of expertise. To be a lawyer was to be a member of a club, certified by a diploma (usually) and credentialled by admission to (or being called to) the bar. “Oh, the humanity!” one might cry, as a kind of cruel joke; law schools are notoriously inhumane. But I am not speaking of making the experience of legal training more humane (although that would clearly be a good thing); I am speaking instead of centering human experience and human capacities in the design of systems of legal training, both in law schools and elsewhere.

I recognize that the likelihood that this will happen is remote, on my terms or on Furlong’s, for many reasons, the first of which is undoubtedly collective skepticism as to my “existentialism” premise.

But I live in Pittsburgh, where during the 1970s and during the heyday of the Steelers’ run of four Super Bowl championships, it was essentially inconceivable that the good times would end. There were abundant good jobs, lots of good money, stable union contracts, and no threats from competitors or different technologies. I was not in Pittsburgh in 1982 and 1983, but more than 40 years later, the region is still deeply scarred by the consequences of complacency.

I once met Jack Schlegel at the University at Buffalo, as part of giving a job talk at that law school. I had no idea then of who he was or what he had written. I have come to be a big admirer of a piece that he published in the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2007, titled “A Damn Hard Thing to Do.” That title, if not the specifics of his motivation and vision, has always stayed with me. Large scale institutional change of any sort is always difficult, especially if one imagines trying to direct it rather than riding waves of evolution and disruption from various sources. As Nicola Shaver reminded the practitioner side of law in her essay – it may be nearly impossible. Her payoff for law firms seems (to me) to apply equally to law schools:

Firms are, in effect, attempting to compete in a fundamentally different market while operating within structures designed for a previous one. As long as that remains the case, progress will be uneven and limited.

Change is possible, but it’s not frictionless. The next few years will require firms to make explicit choices about what they are willing to adapt, and, in some cases, what they are willing to let go. So the better question is no longer whether firms want to change. It’s which ones are prepared to.

And yet (to add a line that I did not include in the conclusion to that series: I remain (guardedly) optimistic, about seeing the scripts (plural) that we (the collective, non-specific “we) in law have been using to constrain our imaginations and about writing and building genuinely new ones. More on that optimism later on.

Now, for a little while, back to the World Cup.

Thanks for sticking with me.