India's Chief Justice Tells Law Schools: Teach AI Under Supervision, Don't Ban It

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant told university leaders on Sunday that law schools should bring artificial intelligence into the classroom under supervision rather than ban it, arguing that graduates will otherwise enter practice already behind their peers. The position, set out at the second edition of the Vice Chancellors' Conclave organised by National Law University, Jodhpur, runs against a global drift toward AI caution in education and recasts the question of legal-AI risk as a question of training.

The mechanism he offers is not laissez-faire. Surya Kant framed supervised use as a discipline of judgment: students should learn not only how to use AI tools, but also how to use them appropriately and ethically, and how to recognise when technology can assist, when it must be questioned, and when it must yield to human reasoning. "Prohibition cannot be the answer to that risk," he said, according to LiveLaw, which first reported the speech from the Jodhpur venue. The corollary is that a student forbidden the tools in school will meet them in law firms, corporate offices, public institutions, policy organisations, technology-driven workplaces and courtrooms, without any supervised practice behind them.

The strongest argument for a ban, the Chief Justice acknowledged, is the one a ban is supposed to solve. AI dependency can erode independent argumentation, and a confident, plausible-sounding output can be legally wrong. He named those risks explicitly rather than dismissing them, and Rediff's summary of the address treats the same triad of dangers as the constraint his pedagogy has to satisfy. His answer is to make the supervision visible, the assessment honest, and the human-judgment floor non-negotiable, rather than to remove the tool from the room.

Surya Kant urged India's National Law Universities to stop responding to technological change and to lead the legal-tech reshaping of the justice system. He called for inter-NLU research collaboration on algorithmic accountability and data protection, and for academic integrity and responsible AI use to be embedded in curriculum and pedagogy rather than appended as policy, according to the LiveLaw report and corroborated by IndiaLegalLive.

The practical question the speech opens is what "supervised" looks like in a law syllabus. Does it mean disclosed AI use with citation, in-class exercises where students must defend or attack an AI-drafted argument, or assessment design that tests independent reasoning against an AI-assisted baseline? Surya Kant did not specify, and the conclave was a Vice Chancellors' forum rather than a curriculum committee, as Prokerala's itinerary notes. Whether any of India's National Law Universities move first, and whether the inter-NLU research collaboration on algorithmic accountability and data protection actually materialises with named projects and shared standards, is the thread to watch from this address.