April Dawson (Photo by Randy Piland/ABA Journal)
As other law professors tiptoe around artificial intelligence, she’s writing the second edition of a textbook on AI and ethics while co-authoring another book focused on legal reasoning. That follows her work launching the law school’s Technology Law and Policy Center with a $5 million grant from Intel; co-founding a 300-plus member professor group focused on AI and law courses; and pioneering a class that helps law students earn an AI governance certification from the International Association of Privacy Professionals, a group focused on privacy, AI governance and digital responsibility.
“What she’s done is amazing,” says Daniel W. Linna Jr., the director of law and technology initiatives at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and co-author with Dawson of the upcoming book AI & Legal Reasoning from Aspen Publishing. “She is a tireless worker. Of course, you also have to be an effective leader to get people to support these things and raise money.”
Dawson fell in love with computers when her mom, a high school teacher in Lake Elsinore, California, brought home an early Apple computer in the mid-1980s. She took computer classes and even got a programming job while in high school. After earning a bachelor’s in computer science at Bennett College, she worked as a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
When she became enamored of the idea of arguing before a jury, she headed to Howard University School of Law at a time before ubiquitous access to personal computers or iPhones.
“So the practice of law didn’t really intersect with technology,” she says. That came a few years later, when she started teaching at NCCU School of Law in 2006. She was an early adopter of now-quaint technology, such as remote control-style clickers for students to answer quizzes.
But once tech started playing a role in how lawyers do their jobs via e-discovery, she explored how to educate students in these new spaces—and that work continues.
“We’re at another moment in time now with AI,” she says. “AI, of course, has been around for decades. But we’re seeing new areas, like AI governance, that weren’t a field two years ago.”
Other law schools ask Dawson’s advice on emerging technologies and the law, especially on two issues.
“One is how should legal educators think about AI disruption, like, how should we teach in light of the fact that our students are using technology?” she says. “And also, how can we as educators leverage the technology ourselves to help us be more efficient?”
She shares credit for the forward thinking that will influence legal education and future lawyers with the center.
“We’ve been able to think outside the box and put things in place that will be table stakes in a couple of years.
