{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/law-teachers-postsecondary/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary",
    "soc_code": "25-1112",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 20060,
    "median_annual_wage": 128500
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 59,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 12,
    "embodiment": 7,
    "liability_shield": 8,
    "trust_premium": 17,
    "judgment_accountability": 15
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Doctrinal lecture prep, casebook note-writing, hypothetical drafting, and grading multiple-choice or IRAC-formatted answers are all reproducible today, which pulls this below the safe band, but cold-calling a 1L through a line of argument he hasn't thought through, supervising a live clinic docket with real clients, and coaching an oral argument keep it at 12 rather than 6.",
    "embodiment": "The work is classroom, office hours, and Zoom, so 7 reflects only the physical fragments that do exist — being bodily present in a lecture hall for accreditation-relevant contact hours, supervising a clinic that appears in court, and judging moot court rounds in person — none of which involves uncontrolled environments.",
    "liability_shield": "Most law professors hold a JD and many a bar licence, but they are not personally liable for teaching content and no statute requires a licence to lecture on torts; the 8 comes from clinical faculty, who are the actual attorney of record on client matters and answer to state bar discipline for them.",
    "trust_premium": "Students choose seminars by professor, judges hire clerks on a specific professor's phone call, and a recommendation letter's value is entirely who signed it — the reputational vouching function cannot be transferred to another instructor or a system, which is why this sits at the top of the band.",
    "judgment_accountability": "Deciding whether a student's professional-responsibility lapse in clinic gets remediated or reported, setting the curve that determines who makes law review, and choosing what unsettled doctrine to teach as the rule are calls with no procedure behind them and consequences that follow the student into practice."
  },
  "rationale": "Law professors do two things AI is already good at — producing doctrinal explanation and drafting written analysis — and one thing it is not: running a live Socratic classroom where students are pushed to defend positions under pressure, and then vouching for those students to employers and courts. Case summaries, model answers, exam-question banks, outline generation, and first drafts of law review pieces are all substantially automatable today; cold-calling, clinic supervision, moot court coaching, and letters of recommendation are not. The real protection here is institutional rather than technological: ABA accreditation standards require full-time faculty, tenure limits headcount churn, and the bar-passage pipeline is a credentialing monopoly — all regulatory scaffolding that can be revised.",
  "outlook": "Headcount stays roughly flat because ABA accreditation and tenure hold the line, but the doctrinal lecture-and-outline tier thins while clinical, advocacy, and supervision faculty become the center of gravity.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "ABA Standard 304/306 revisions that require identified full-time faculty of record to certify supervision hours for experiential and distance-education credits — plus state bar clinic rules (e.g., student-practice orders in NY, CA) naming a licensed, malpractice-liable supervising attorney for every clinic matter. If clinic and experiential credit minimums rise (Standard 303's 6-credit floor moving up, as the ABA has repeatedly floated), the share of the job that legally requires a bar-licensed signer grows.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "ABA Standard 402/403 (full-time faculty must teach a substantial majority of credit hours) being retained or tightened rather than relaxed during the ABA's periodic accreditation review; conversely a variance regime permitting AI-delivered doctrinal credit would cut this. Watch the Council on Legal Education's agenda items on distance ed caps.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: if outline generation, case briefing, model answers, and exam banks are conceded to AI, the residual job is cold-call sequencing, clinic case triage, and Socratic pressure-testing — none of which is asynchronous text. Task-mix shift alone raises this without any rule change, visible already where schools license commercial AI study tools and reassign faculty time to experiential teaching.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Character-and-fitness and academic-misconduct roles hardening: as AI use in exams proliferates, faculty become the accountable adjudicators of honor-code findings that determine bar admission eligibility, and state bar C&F committees rely on dean/faculty certifications. Formalizing faculty-signed AI-use attestations on graded work would make this an owned, contestable call.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Already near ceiling at 17 — recommendation letters to judges for clerkships (federal judiciary hiring plan relies on named-faculty vouching) are the mechanism, and it is hard to raise further. If clerkship and BigLaw hiring formally discount or ban AI-assisted references, the named-human premium is reinforced rather than increased.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 1
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Embodiment has no route; law teaching is not physical. The dominant risk is not AI capability but enrollment and cost pressure: if the ABA relaxes full-time faculty and distance-ed limits, or state supreme courts expand non-JD licensure pathways (Washington, Oregon, Utah alternatives to the bar exam), headcount falls regardless of how high liability_shield and trust_premium score for the survivors. The credentialing monopoly is the whole game, and it is a policy variable."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 16900,
        "wage": 104910
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 16990,
        "wage": 111140
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 16180,
        "wage": 113530
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 14930,
        "wage": 116430
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 14110,
        "wage": 123470
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 14830,
        "wage": 108860
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 14570,
        "wage": 127360
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 22800,
        "wage": 126650
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 20060,
        "wage": 128500
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 18.7,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}