In a 1L legal research course it is important to focus on teaching basic legal research skills. That is, how to identify and locate relevant statutes, cases, and regulations that are responsive to the question the student is trying to answer.  A student who understands the tools and techniques of print legal research will be better equipped to search and evaluate online sources, including Gen AI. A student who has only ever done research online may never have used an index, or understand its value. It's impossible to recognize a hallucinated citation merely by looking at it; a student needs to know how to look up a citation to see first if it exists, and then to see whether the cited thing says what Gen AI says it says.  This session will cover a variety of pitfalls experienced by students learning legal research, especially in primary sources. It will conclude with a discussion of four reasons why teaching Boolean logic is even more important in the age of the algorithm.

Speaker