About the Institute

Where legal reasoning meets computational systems

The Institute for Law & AI at Washington and Lee brings lawyers, computer scientists, and students together to study how artificial intelligence is reshaping legal practice, doctrine, and institutions — and to shape that change deliberately rather than absorb it passively.

We work at the seam between two disciplines that rarely share a room: the common-law tradition's habits of precedent, argument, and judgment, and the fast-moving engineering culture that builds the systems now writing contracts, predicting outcomes, and sitting in on discovery.

Rather than treat AI as a topic bolted onto existing courses, the Institute builds original research, clinics, and public programming from the ground up — grounded in how these systems actually behave, not just how they're marketed.