Measuring the Rapidly Increasing Use of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Scholarship

8 Pages Posted: 28 Apr 2025

See all articles by Michael Conklin

Michael Conklin

Angelo State University - Business Law; Texas A&M University School of Law

Christopher Houston

Angelo State University

Date Written: March 23, 2025

Abstract

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on nearly every industry, including legal academia. As AI-driven tools like ChatGPT become more prevalent, they raise critical questions about authorship, academic integrity, and the evolving nature of legal writing. While AI offers promising benefits—such as improved efficiency in research, drafting, and analysis—it also presents ethical dilemmas related to originality, bias, and the potential homogenization of legal discourse.

One of the challenges in assessing AI’s influence on legal scholarship is the difficulty of identifying AI-generated content. Traditional plagiarism-detection methods are often inadequate, as AI does not merely copy existing text but generates novel outputs based on probabilistic language modeling. This first-of-its-kind study uses the existence of an AI idiosyncrasy to measure the use of AI in legal scholarship. This provides the first-ever empirical evidence of a sharp increase in the use of AI in legal scholarship, thus raising pressing questions about the proper role of AI in shaping legal scholarship and the practice of law. By applying a novel framework to highlight the rapidly evolving challenges at the intersection of AI and legal academia, this Essay will hopefully spark future debate on the careful balance in this area.

Suggested Citation

Conklin, Michael and Houston, Christopher, Measuring the Rapidly Increasing Use of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Scholarship (March 23, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5190385 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5190385

Michael Conklin (Contact Author)

Angelo State University - Business Law ( email )

United States

Texas A&M University School of Law ( email )

Tarrant County
United States

Christopher Houston

Angelo State University ( email )

2601 W. Avenue N
San Angelo, TX 76909
United States

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