Institute for Law and AI

The AI and Law Institute at W&L Law exists to help the legal profession navigate the rapidly evolving intersection of artificial intelligence, legal ethics, and professional responsibility. Our mission is to bridge the gap between a lawyer's ethical duties in using AI tools and their obligation of technological competence as AI becomes central to modern legal practice.

The Institute trains law students, faculty, attorneys, and judges to understand the inner workings of AI systems, enabling them to use machine learning effectively, safely, and defensibly. This includes examining how AI training data, model design, and user interactions influence outcomes, and teaching practitioners how to reduce the risks of AI hallucinations, bias, misinformation, privacy breaches, and manipulation.

Curriculum

W&L Law currently offers the following AI-focused courses to students.

AI for Legal Practice
Required one-credit course that prepares every first-year student to understand, evaluate, and responsibly use artificial intelligence before the academic year begins. The course combines foundational instruction in AI technology with practical exercises designed to help students develop sound professional habits that will serve them throughout law school and their legal careers.

Artificial Intelligence and the Law: Governance & Effective Practice
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the practice of law and the substance of legal doctrine. This upper-level course equips future lawyers to (1) understand core technical concepts -how contemporary AI systems are trained, validated, and deployed; (2) assess the professional-responsibility implications of using AI tools in counseling, litigation, and transactional work; and (3) analyze the emerging statutory, regulatory, constitutional, and common-law frameworks that will govern AI systems and their human partners.

Director

The Insitute is directed by Professor Josh Fairfield,William Donald Bain Family Professor of Law at Washington and Lee and Director of Artificial Intelligence Legal Innovation Strategy. His scholarship spans AI and cognitive security, virtual worlds and digital property, data privacy, blockchain and smart contracts, and emerging-technology law.

He is the author of Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom and Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?, both from Cambridge University Press. Before law teaching he was a technology entrepreneur, including as Director of Research and Development at Rosetta Stone. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.

More Information

To learn more, visit the Institute website.