From Casebooks to Code: How AI Is Changing the Classroom

Yesterday, I walked into a classroom to conduct an AI bootcamp for law students. First-year law students, mind you. And I left learning lot many new things.

| From Casebooks to Code: How AI Is Changing the Classroom |

The objective was fairly straightforward: to help them understand how Artificial Intelligence is transforming the legal landscape in India and, more importantly, introduce them to the tools and possibilities that could help them prepare for a profession that may look very different by the time they graduate.

We began with a conversation that has almost become unavoidable whenever AI enters a classroom- “What is AI and will it replace us?” My answer was simple. AI may not replace you, but someone who knows how to work effectively with AI may have an advantage over someone who does not.

What followed, however, surprised even me. Within the same bootcamp, students went from discussing the changing legal profession to actually building things.

Some created websites that could calculate monthly savings and SIPs. Others designed complete travel itineraries with integrated Google Maps. A few worked on systematic time-management tools to help students balance academics, extracurricular activities and everything else that college life brings with it.

And then came the legal applications. Dense, text-heavy case laws were converted into structured compendiums. Cases that can sometimes feel intimidating to a first-year student were transformed into simple storybooks to make the facts, arguments and principles easier to understand.

These were students who had only recently entered law school. Watching them experiment made me realise that AI has changed something fundamental about classroom learning. Earlier, technology largely helped students access information. Today, it allows them to interact with information, reorganise it, visualise it and, increasingly, build something with it.

The classroom, therefore, cannot remain limited to a professor delivering information and students reproducing it in an examination. This does not mean abandoning books, classrooms, doctrinal understanding or traditional methods of learning. For law students in particular, reading, interpretation, reasoning and critical thinking remain indispensable. AI cannot become a substitute for understanding the law.

But it can become an extraordinary companion to learning it. Perhaps this is also where our education system needs to evolve. The needs of society, workplaces and professions are changing faster than ever. If the world outside the university is becoming interdisciplinary, technology-enabled and problem-oriented, education cannot remain confined to rigid disciplinary boundaries and traditional methods of assessment.

Students need opportunities to experiment, create, question, fail, rebuild and solve real problems. What stayed with me after the bootcamp was not simply that first-year law students could use AI tools. It was how quickly they could imagine what to do with them once they were given the freedom to explore.

And perhaps that is the larger lesson for educators. Our role may no longer be only to tell students what they need to know. Increasingly, it is also to help them learn how to think, how to adapt, and how to use the tools around them responsibly.

Because the smartest classroom may not be the one with the most technology. It may simply be the one that teaches students what to do with it.