What happened
The Daily Record reports that Maryland law schools have no common approach to artificial intelligence. At the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, professor Donald Tobin advocates teaching students to use AI critically, while professor Andrew Blair-Stanek prohibits it in his classes. University of Baltimore professor Michele Gilman says students need both practical training and stronger judgment about AI-generated work.
The Daily Record reports that Maryland law students and educators are struggling to reach a consensus about artificial intelligence in the classroom. The article places that debate within a wider shift in higher education, saying policies differ among law schools, with some prohibiting AI and others allowing it in limited circumstances. The report does not independently verify the national policy landscape or provide a comprehensive survey of Maryland schools, so the examples should be read as reported cases rather than a complete inventory.
At the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, The Daily Record reports that professor Donald Tobin co-authored a July Jurist article criticizing a policy that prohibited AI use at UC Berkeley School of Law. Tobin told the outlet that AI will be an essential tool and that pretending it does not exist would be a mistake. The article presents his position as an argument for adapting legal pedagogy, not as evidence that a particular Maryland school has adopted a unified AI policy.
The Daily Record also reports that University of Maryland law professor Andrew Blair-Stanek prohibits AI use in his classes. Blair-Stanek said there is no reliable way to enforce a complete ban, but argued that his approach encourages students to engage with course material and answer questions without assistance from AI. The report does not identify the specific courses, enforcement procedures or consequences associated with that policy.
The article describes a different instructional approach from Tobin. The Daily Record reports that he sometimes asks students to examine a large language model’s response to a prompt and identify three errors. That exercise is intended to teach students to question AI output and understand where the technology is useful or unreliable. The report does not provide test results showing whether this method improves legal research, writing or exam performance.
Student views are also divided. The Daily Record reports that rising second-year student Abigail Fry does not use AI because she has encountered examples of hallucinated legal citations and cases. Samuel Irwin, who co-authored the Jurist article with Tobin, said AI can help with permitted tasks such as organizing notes and checking spelling and grammar. The source does not establish how many students share either position.
The Daily Record reports that University of Baltimore professor Michele Gilman considers responsible instruction urgent because experienced professors may be better equipped to judge whether AI output is acceptable than students are. The article does not identify a formal University of Baltimore policy or a required AI course, and it does not independently confirm the professors’ descriptions of classroom practice.
The report also quotes alumna Katherine Sylva, who said AI was often treated as a villain while she attended the University of Maryland and that familiarity with AI tools would have been useful before entering firms. The Daily Record reports that she is preparing for a career in technology law and sees a gap between classroom attitudes and workplace expectations. The source provides no survey of employers to measure how widespread those expectations are.
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Why it matters
The debate affects how future lawyers learn legal reasoning, writing and verification. The Daily Record’s reporting shows a practical tension: students may need AI skills for legal workplaces, but relying on systems that can produce false cases or citations could weaken the foundations those workplaces require.
The Daily Record’s reporting matters because legal education is training people to work with authoritative texts, professional duties and high consequences for error. If students use AI to produce legal analysis without checking it, false citations or unsupported claims could enter assignments and eventually professional work. The article provides examples of those concerns but does not independently quantify how often such errors occur or how much harm they have caused.
The central tension reported by The Daily Record is not simply whether students should use AI. It is whether they can learn to use it responsibly before they have developed the knowledge needed to detect its mistakes. Gilman told the outlet that experienced professors can make considered judgments about AI output, while students may lack that perspective. That distinction makes basic legal training relevant to any policy allowing AI assistance.
The article also indicates why blanket bans may be difficult to sustain. The Daily Record reports that Blair-Stanek acknowledges there is no reliable way to enforce a full prohibition, while Tobin and Irwin identify limited uses that may reduce tedious work. If enforcement is weak or rules are unclear, students may face inconsistent expectations across courses and may not know when assistance becomes unauthorized substitution for their own work.
At the same time, The Daily Record reports that law firms and the broader legal profession are beginning to integrate AI. Preparing students for that environment could have practical value, especially for tasks involving organization, drafting support or document review. But the source does not independently confirm employer requirements, productivity gains, cost savings or improved legal outcomes. Those unknowns limit what can be concluded about the benefits of early classroom adoption.
The stakes extend beyond academic integrity. The Daily Record reports that educators are trying to preserve students’ ability to reason and answer questions independently while preparing them for a changing profession. That is a public-facing concern because lawyers’ work can affect clients, courts and legal rights. The article does not report a new rule by Maryland’s courts or bar authorities, so its significance is educational and prospective rather than a change in professional regulation.
What to watch next
The Daily Record reports that Maryland educators view AI policy as unfinished. Key questions include whether schools create clearer rules for permitted uses, how professors enforce bans, whether AI literacy becomes part of legal curricula, and how employers’ expectations influence classroom standards. The source does not independently establish how widespread these policies are or whether they improve student outcomes.
The Daily Record reports that Maryland law educators regard the issue as a work in progress. Future developments to watch include whether individual professors move from informal rules to written, course-level standards; whether schools distinguish permitted editing or organization from substantive legal analysis; and whether students receive instruction on verifying citations, cases and other authorities produced by AI.
Another question is enforcement. Blair-Stanek’s reported view that a full ban cannot be reliably enforced suggests that compliance may depend on course design, assessment methods and student disclosure. The source does not say whether Maryland law schools are adopting oral examinations, process documentation, citation audits or other measures. Without such information, it is not possible to assess how consistently current policies operate.
The Daily Record’s account also points to a curriculum question: should AI literacy be taught as a professional skill, a legal-ethics issue, or both? Tobin’s reported classroom exercise treats model output as an object of criticism, while Gilman emphasizes that students need judgment before they can evaluate AI responsibly. The source does not report any statewide curriculum standard or accreditation requirement that resolves this question.
Employer expectations will be another pressure point. The Daily Record reports that Sylva wished she had become more comfortable with AI tools before entering a firm environment and that Gilman believes the profession expects effective use of them. Those observations are individual accounts, not independently verified evidence of industry-wide demand. More useful evidence would include law-firm policies, bar guidance, hiring data and documented examples of how lawyers use AI in practice.
Finally, reliability remains a practical constraint. The Daily Record reports student concern about hallucinated legal citations and cases, but gives no comparative testing of specific AI systems, no error rate and no independent assessment of safeguards. Readers should therefore treat the article as evidence of an active institutional debate, not proof that any particular approach is safer or more effective. The extent to which classroom policies change student competence, professional conduct or legal-service quality remains unknown.
