AI & the Law
Introduction to the intersection of artificial intelligence and the law, focusing on its challenges, opportunities, ethics, and impact on the law, the legal industry, and society.
How this course works
- Work through the activity
- Post by Friday, 11:59 PM
- Reply by Sunday, 11:59 PM
- 1Activity 1
How a Machine Writes, and How It Fails
A chatbot's answer to a question about Florida security deposits arrives in seconds, with a statute number, a deadline, and a case name that sounds right. Nothing in it…
- 2Activity 2
Who Governs a Machine? Washington and the States
Who writes the rules for a machine that answers customers and ranks job applicants: Congress, the President, or the state where the customer lives? The Constitution…
- 3Activity 3
The Signature: Competence, Candor, and the Partner at 7 p.m.
A partner on a filing deadline hands her paralegal a motion that a chatbot drafted, with nine Florida cases nobody has read, and says to file it tonight. The signature…
- 4Activity 4
Verification as a Craft: Existence Is Not Enough
A citation in a brief answers five questions, whether or not anyone asks them. Does the case exist, did it decide what the brief says, does the cited page say it, are…
- 5Activity 5
Context, Not Prompts
A commercial lease for a Coral Gables café buries its personal guarantee near the end, under Miscellaneous. Hand the lease to a chatbot with a one-line request to find…
- 6Activity 6
Who Owns the Output? The Moot
Arguments about AI and copyright usually get told as creators against technology companies. The more useful question is which use a court is judging. The law answers…
- 7Activity 7
Who Answers for What a Machine Says and Does?
Tort law was built for harms with an author: a driver who ran the light, a maker who shipped the cracked ladder, a newspaper that printed the false charge. A chatbot's…
- 8Activity 8
Who Decides When a Machine Decides, and Who Watches?
When software turns down a job applicant or names a suspect, it can look as if no one decided, and the law does not accept that answer. It traces each decision back to…
- 9Activity 9
Whose Face, Whose Voice?
A fake photograph or recording of you raises four legal questions, and no one body of law answers them all. Evidence law asks whether a court can trust that the file is…
- 10Activity 10
The Client Who Talked to a Chatbot
Florida lets anyone explain what the law says, and it lets only a lawyer tell a particular person what the law means for him. A chatbot will do the second for anyone who…
- 11Activity 11
The Work: Who May Hand What to a Machine?
In 2004 the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new divorce trial because the judge had signed one side's proposed judgment, unchanged, two hours after receiving it, without…
- 12Activity 12
The Frontier: Person, Product, or Something New?
A Florida corporation has the same powers as an individual to sue, be sued, and own land, and admiralty law has long treated a ship that commits an aggression as the…
- PProject
The AI Adoption Playbook
Every firm that puts an AI tool to work on client matters is making a bet: that the tool will save more time than checking its work will cost. The bet can be tested…