Beyond AI
First published: October 27, 2025. Posted here for archival purposes.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
New for me
Last week I accepted an invitation to serve as a co-editor of the legal education side of the TaxProf Blog at AALS, the re-booted and continuing version of the extraordinary successful and useful TaxProf Blog supervised for decades (yes, decades) by Pepperdine Law Dean Paul Caron. AALS is the Association of American Law Schools.
The blog combines two themes that are sometimes related and sometimes not: tax law, scholarship, and practice; and the state of US law schools.
As Paul steps back from the blog, my fellow new co-editors on the legal education side are Austen Parrish, Dean of the law school at UC Irvine, former Dean of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University (Bloomington), and currently the president of the AALS; Michael Hunter Schwartz, law professor and former Dean at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific; and Alena Allen, law professor and former Dean of the Paul M Herbert Law Center at Louisiana State University.
It’s a group of terrific, thoughtful people, and I’m honored to be included. Each of the four of us will post occasional notes and comments about the past, present, and future of law schools, with forays (I suspect) occasionally beyond the US and also beyond the educational sphere as such. It’s all connected.
Readers of this Substack who are not law professors or lawyers and who may not have followed my work might wonder: what am I up to?
This, I think:
On my “old” law blog, which was active for nearly 20 years, I started by writing, mostly, about IP law and technology and ended by writing, mostly, about innovation and legal education. I developed (and continue to possess) a more than typical skepticism about the systems, structures, and practices that define our educational communities and wondered (and continue to wonder) about how we might, collectively, do better.
I eventually posted some longer blog pieces publicly to SSRN (here, and here, for example, plus (bonus!) this one, about textbooks and casebooks, never posted to an archive), but I never formally published them. (I tried. The editors of the Journal of Legal Education seemed not to be interested.) Instead, I shifted gears a bit, spending several years producing a law-and-technology themed podcast (“The Future Law Podcast”) with Dan Hunter (now the Executive Dean of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London), where I learned a lot about the contemporary state of lawyering and education and met a lot of fellow futurists in law, around the world. I invested hundreds of hours in co-organizing in-person gatherings of legal education futurists, documented at the website called “Future Law Works.” Some of the early posts to this Substack carried forward that legal education theme. The institutions of law and legal education are connected in complicated ways to systems of higher education and beyond.
Much as I have steered more recently into topics beyond law as such, I have not lost track of the drawbacks and opportunities associated with contemporary legal education. I accepted the TaxProf Blog invitation in part to direct some of my futurist energy back into the legal education community itself. Sharp-eyed readers will note that alone among my co-editor corps, I am not and have never been a law school dean. I’ve been in full-time academia for nearly 30 years, however, and I know at least as much as any “regular” full-time faculty member might both about how the proverbial sausage is made, about how the sausage factory was built, and about who runs it, why, and with what money and other resources. Leadership experience comes in many forms and from many sources. Deans know a lot, but they don’t know everything, and sometimes they know less (and know that they know less, if they are wise deans) than faculty, students, alumni, and practitioners imagine they do.
I do not expect to cross-post between that site and this one. But inevitably what I write at the TaxProf Blog and what I write here will harmonize in multiple respects, including possibly unexpected ones. The result may not come together as elegantly as the plot of “The Philadelphia Story,” with the lead characters looking back at the audience looking in, but here and there, I hope to entertain as well as inform.
What others have to say
Selections from new-ish commentary about the institutions of higher education and institutions of expertise, shared because these folks have me thinking, not necessarily because I agree.
Jennifer Pahlka at Eating Policy, “Announcing the Recoding America Fund: A bipartisan reckoning with the administrative state”:
“If you want a government that can achieve its policy goals, it must be capable of four key things:
- It must be able to attract, select, develop, retain, and manage the right people, which means we need civil service systems at all levels fit for that purpose. Our civil service systems run the gamut from merely outdated to fundamentally unfit for this critical work.
- It must ask those people to do the right work, which means reducing the procedural bloat that keeps most civil servants from focusing on the substantive outcomes the public needs and expects.
- It must have purpose-fit systems, which means changing how we build and buy technology so it can adapt to changing needs and drive effective operations.
- And it must employ test-and-learn frameworks, which means being able to act on what we learn as we pursue policy goals rather than stay locked into decades-long plans even as we can see they are not working. This also means constructing feedback loops between the makers of law and policy and those who implement them or experience their consequences, intended and unintended.”
(When I read this, I wondered: what would change if I were to substitute the phrase “a university” for “a government”?)
Bryan Alexander at AI, academia, and the Future, “Hosting an AI and academia design session”:
“On the Future Trends Forum* we’ll have a group brainstorm/design exercise, where together we imagine how a new campus might appear and function in the age of AI. I’ll facilitate, using various tools to help people develop and share ideas: polling, whiteboard, chat, design thinking prompts.
This is a new thing for us. We’ve held scenarios and role-playing events on the Forum, but this is the first time we’re doing a design from scratch exercise. It’s an experiment! (Any thoughts or suggestions ahead of time appreciated, along with reflections afterwards.)”
(That’s an announcement of an event that has now ended, but presumably the work will continue. Follow along at the Future Trends Forum, here.)
My bookshelf
Like a lot of academics, I read a lot. Like a lot of law professors, I read a lot about law and about governance. But I also read a lot of things just for fun and a lot of other things because you never know where interesting ideas might come from.
I am still working my way through Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and, now, Sarah A. Seo, “Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom” (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Thanks for sticking with me.