UC Berkeley Law School Adopts New, Strict Ban On AI Use By Students

UC Berkeley Law has adopted a new policy banning students’ use of AI for academic work they submit for credit.

getty

The University of California, Berkeley Law School has adopted a new, more strict policy governing law students’ use of AI. The rule, which goes into effect this summer, forbids their use of AI for most activities associated with academic work that’s submitted for credit.

The new policy states that:

“The use of AI is prohibited for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit. AI use is prohibited for any use for any purpose in any exam situation. Students may not upload course materials—including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content—into generative AI systems. AI can be used for research on papers ONLY for the limited purpose of identifying sources, such as cases, statutes, or secondary sources. Students are responsible for the accuracy of their research and all other aspects of their submitted work. Citations to sources that do not exist will raise a presumption of prohibited AI use.”

A potentially broad exception is carved out for those courses that “are designed intentionally to teach AI fluency” as well as for other courses where the instructor decides for pedagogical reasons to ask for permission in writing to deviate from the default prohibition.

In a series of posts yesterday on X, Chris Hoofnagle, a Teaching Professor of Law In Residence at UC Berkeley Law and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said that the prior policy was based on the concept of plagiarism, “but the rapid increase in capabilities in Claude particularly caused us to shift focus: the new policy seeks to protect the cognitive skills constitutive of a legal education.”

While the former policy permitted students to use AI technology to help them make corrections to required writing assignments, the new policy specifies several…

Source