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A necessary review of Brazilian legal education: reflections on academic processes in the face of the reality of generative artificial intelligence.
- May 15
- 25 min read
Summary
This article proposes a critical review of Brazilian legal education, historically linked to European models and restricted to elites until the mid-20th century, in light of the pedagogical crisis of the 21st century and the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GAI). It analyzes criticisms of excessively theoretical and fragmented training, which fails to develop practical skills and critical thinking, and examines the National Curriculum Guidelines (2018/2021), which prioritize active methodologies, theory-practice integration, and competencies for contemporary challenges. It discusses the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on Law, exemplified by AI in the Brazilian Supreme Court (MARIA) and the Superior Court of Justice (STJ Logos), and the ethical and pedagogical dilemmas of GAI. It advocates for its ethical integration into legal education, aligned with SDGs 4 and 9 and UNESCO guidelines, to train prepared and critical jurists.
Keywords:
Legal education; Generative artificial intelligence; Fourth Industrial Revolution; Curriculum reform; Ethical challenges
Based on the premises of scholars who preceded me on the development of legal education in Brazil, originally linked to European educational matrices (1), with a strong appreciation for the Portuguese legal system (2), territorially national only after the first half of the 19th century (3) and, still, restricted to elites until the mid-20th century, this work assumes the function of presenting a new paradigm of higher education in Law with emphasis on the disruptive technology of generative artificial intelligence, in the face of a latent crisis in legal education in the first decades of the 21st century.
The crisis in legal education now being announced does not shake any higher education researcher with at least a decade of teaching experience. Ada Pelegrini Grinover, back in 1992, warned that the traditional curriculum of law courses lacked the critical training indispensable to the desired graduate of the law course, given the stagnation of teaching limited to scientific content, dissociated from full critical, practical and humanistic training.
“ current education does not enable students to operate the law as it is actually practiced in society and in the courts; it does not allow them to understand the law as a social phenomenon, limiting itself to presenting it as a set of rules that cannot be questioned; it does not develop their sensitivity to solving new problems, for which legislation does not always offer answers in its rules. " (4)
Thus, in addition to the formal inadequacy of academic programs at the end of the last century not contemplating the complete training of a graduate with full scope to exercise various legal careers, also, as Álvaro Melo Filho (5) predicts, the crisis in legal education is, on a large scale, a product of the changes in the society in which the law manifests itself and the growing complexity of the law and the legislative inflation promoted by the new demands of contemporary life (6).
If, in fact, the crisis is inherent to the organic processes of transformation of cosmopolitan (7) and globalized (8) society, new social contexts and cultural (9), political and geopolitical, and also economic realities demand a synthetic – and not organic – transformation in the way in which the art of the craft concerning the legal “order” (10) should be transmitted to new generations (11). The proposals to complement the traditional – and still present – fragmented model of teaching in isolated disciplines, which excessively values exposition followed by memorization of content, needed to be overcome. For this, it was necessary to adopt a vision of knowledge construction in an integrated way between disciplines, allowing an effective connection between theory, real and simulated practices, combined with propaedeutic content.
