Critical Legal AI Literacies: Emily Bender on “Large Language Models and the Lawyer’s Search for Meaning”

The Lillian Goldman Law Library, through the generous support of the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, is pleased to present Critical Legal AI Literacies. This speaker series seeks to expose the Yale Law community and the legal field to alternative perspectives on AI and the law that are grounded in empirical evidence and critical considerations about the development, use, and impact of generative AI.

The first speaker in the series was Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington and coauthor of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want (with Alex Hanna). Speaking to the Yale Law community via Zoom on September 9, 2025, Professor Bender provided an overview of large language models and their suitability for use in the legal field.

The slides from Professor Bender’s presentation are available at: https://bit.ly/EMB-Yale-25