11 June 2026

Law Professors prefer AI

New paper

Researchers at Stanford University has recently released an interesting paper. In an experiment Law professors rated answers to legal questions written by AI and other law professors respectively. In the experiment, the law professors rated AI answers higher than the answers from their colleagues.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53%, vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreements an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.

Read the full paper.

Topics