Generative AI (GenAI) tools promise improved decision-making and efficiency, but these tools are known to return inaccurate or incomplete answers, creating serious risks for the legal profession. GenAI is now unavoidable in legal research. Thus, novice GenAI users need direct instruction on GenAI oversight. This article introduces a framework for evaluating GenAI-oversight effectiveness, examines common oversight failures, and suggests activities to introduce effective oversight to novice users of GenAI-powered legal research tools.
Allied professionals comprise a significant portion of the law library workforce, yet their experiences and career pathways are often overlooked in discussions about the profession's future. This article presents findings from a survey examining how allied professionals pursue professional development, upskilling, and career mobility. While respondents demonstrated a strong commitment to growth, opportunities varied widely and were often limited by institutional support. The authors discuss the survey findings, explore the implications for the profession, and offer recommendations for better supporting allied professionals and recognizing their essential contributions to law librarianship. This is the first in a two-part series.
This paper examines the practical tradeoffs of choosing among legal research methods-including print/index research, Boolean searching, natural-language search, and generative AI-by evaluating not only cost and efficiency, but also their impacts on accuracy, skill development, preservation of legal knowledge, bias, professional responsibility, and environmental sustainability. It rests on two premises: first, that effective legal research is an iterative learning process through which researchers develop legal reasoning and judgment; and second, that the legal profession depends on creativity, analytical depth, and the ability to develop novel solutions to complex problems. While generative AI may increase efficiency, this paper argues that its value cannot be evaluated without accounting for verification burdens, hallucination risks, diminished engagement with the research process, and potential harms to professional development. If AI tools shift lawyers- particularly junior associates-from substantive analysis to primarily verification roles, they risk weakening the very skills that distinguish legal practice from information retrieval. The research process itself remains essential to cultivating judgment, creativity, and analytical rigor.
From roughly 1970 to 2010, law and economics rose from the margins to a dominant position in American legal academia, accompanied by a dramatic increase in citations to law and economics scholarship. Citation analysis is often treated as a proxy for intellectual merit, but that assumption becomes questionable when ideas are advanced through systematic, well-funded, and sustained promotion aimed at serving specific political and economic interests. This study examines the right-wing funding networks that supported the rise of law and economics and analyzes the resulting bibliometric patterns in legal scholarship. By tracing these financial and citation dynamics, the study argues that the ascendancy of law and economics was neither inevitable nor grounded solely in intellectual quality. Instead, it reflects a deliberate strategy to cultivate academic legitimacy for a purportedly neutral but politically targeted, pro-corporate, anti-regulatory legal doctrine-one that has played a significant role in shaping American law, legal education, and public policy over the past half-century.
Legal research instructors can use multiple-choice questions to teach students to learn legal research. Implementing multiple-choice questions in legal research courses not only carries rich pedagogical benefits but also effectively addresses the challenges posed by the new NextGen Bar Exam. Legal research instructors must thoroughly evaluate the overall principles of multiple-choice question design and diligently tailor each element of the multiple-choice questions. They further need to develop policies to support the implementation of multiple-choice questions to maximize their rich potential.
