Interdisciplinary Integration of Legal Education and Cultivation of Application-Oriented Rule of Law Talents in the Age of AI ()
1. Introduction of the Issue
As a key part of higher education’s “four new” disciplines—defined in China’s higher education reform as “new engineering, new liberal arts, new agricultural sciences, and new medical sciences” to align with national strategic needs and technological innovation, this discipline links academic research, industrial practice, and major social issue-solving. Amid rapid digital advancement and industrial restructuring, these disciplines break traditional boundaries, emphasizing interdisciplinary integration and practicality to nurture talents for the new development paradigm. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education during the AI era must adapt to the new requirements imposed on philosophy and social sciences in the modern age. It embodies the important characteristics of integrating law with the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation, providing support for building a legal education system with Chinese characteristics, style, and ethos. The core elements of interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era are primarily reflected in three aspects: first, inheritance and innovation. Those who understand constants and adapt to changes succeed; those who uphold principles while innovating advance. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era needs to be based on traditional legal education, inheriting its essence, and innovating teaching models on a foundation of orthodoxy. Second, intersection and fusion. Since the 21st century, the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation centered on digitization, networking, and intelligence has deepened the digital transformation of economies and societies worldwide. The development of digital governments and digital economies underscores the importance of digitization in the modern era. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era must not only promote cross-fusion within legal disciplines and with other digital disciplines in teaching content, but also build digital online resource platforms in teaching methods to modernize legal education models. Third, collaboration and sharing. By leveraging digital networks to establish cloud-based teaching platforms, resource sharing among universities can be promoted, while collaborative partnerships between universities and legal practice institutions, such as courts and law firms, are fostered to cultivate high-quality, applied, and composite legal talents in the AI era.
Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era encompasses both a knowledge logic centered on “inheritance” and “innovation,” as well as a social logic focused on “cognition” and “practice” (Lei & Sun, 2024). From the perspective of the new liberal arts, integrating learning and training is an inevitable choice for addressing complex societal demands and cultivating composite, applied talents. As a crucial link connecting theoretical and practical learning, interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era holds profound significance for enhancing students’ legal practice qualities. However, traditional legal education models overly emphasize theoretical knowledge transmission, leading to a disconnect between theory and practice. Employers, both domestically and internationally, believe that many recent law graduates lack advanced legal practical skills. Moreover, under traditional models, the content of interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era is limited, teaching resources are insufficiently abundant, and methods are relatively monolithic, restricting students’ full development. This fails to meet the needs of building a socialist rule-of-law system with Chinese characteristics and provides inadequate intellectual and theoretical support for modernizing the national governance system. Therefore, using interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era as an opportunity to drive teaching reform through its innovativeness, fusibility, and shareability is highly necessary.
2. Current Dilemmas in Interdisciplinary Integration of Legal
Education in the AI Era
The study combined three research methods to collect and analyze data. First, literature retrieval and document analysis were conducted to gather public materials, including official university websites, interdisciplinary teaching syllabi, course evaluation reports, and related academic papers. Second, field investigations were carried out at each university to observe teaching practices and collect first-hand institutional data. Third, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 25 key informants, including 15 faculty members (specialized in legal AI, interdisciplinary education management, etc.) and 10 senior students (majoring in law with interdisciplinary learning experience). Interview questions focused on four core elements: curriculum content design, implementation approaches of interdisciplinary courses, faculty guidance models, and application of intelligent teaching tools.
Collected qualitative data were analyzed using thematic coding: after transcribing interview recordings and sorting document materials, two researchers independently coded the data based on the four core elements, then cross-validated coding results to ensure reliability. Quantitative information extracted from documents (e.g., course credit distribution, teaching tool usage frequency) was used to supplement qualitative analysis.
Through the above methods, the study distilled the main characteristics of the four core elements from the practices of the five universities, systematically examined the shortcomings of existing teaching models and their root causes, and further proposed targeted optimization strategies.
Based on current practices, interdisciplinary integration models in legal education in the AI era can be categorized into four types: the traditional model emphasizes high consistency between teaching methods and actual courtroom trials; the ternary model focuses on enriching teaching content; the teacher-student interactive model explores new paradigms in guidance; and the cloud-based model fully utilizes online education platforms to innovate teaching tools (Zi & Fu, 2025). The specific contents of these four models are as follows: The traditional model, represented by C University in the west and W University in the central region, involves instructors adapting criminal and civil cases, with students analyzing and discussing cases in groups under guidance, then drawing lots to select roles for mock trials (Lao & Cai, 2025). The ternary model, represented by P University in the north, “divides the course into three directions: civil and administrative litigation clinics, small and micro enterprise legal affairs clinics, and legislative clinics, covering lawyer, legal affairs, and legislative practice areas” (Zi & Fu, 2025). The teacher-student interactive model, represented by Z University in the south, features professional judges as presiding judges, students as panel members, and professional lawyers as plaintiff and defendant agents in mock trials. The cloud-based model, represented by T University in the east, leverages high-quality online courses on platforms like Zhishi.com in areas such as the Civil Code, capital finance, and corporate business (Zi & Fu, 2025).
2.1. Lack of Forward-Thinking in Teaching Philosophies
Through in-depth surveys of interdisciplinary integration practices in legal education in the AI era, the forward-thinking characteristics of the four main models are summarized. Overall, the current mainstream philosophies for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era are outdated, primarily manifested in three aspects.
First, teaching philosophies lag behind the new situations and requirements of rule-of-law construction, lacking practicality. China is currently in a critical period of comprehensively advancing the rule of law, where legal talents need not only solid legal knowledge but also strong practical abilities. However, the prevailing interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era remains stuck in traditional patterns of “emphasizing process over substance” and “imitation over innovation,” overly focusing on formal procedural mimicry while lacking substantive practical training. This affects learning outcomes and fails to meet the practical requirements for cultivating composite legal talents. As noted in a commentary on legal education quality, the disconnect between legal education and legal practice is a prominent issue (Zhang, 2024).
Second, teaching philosophies lack awareness of technological applications. Currently, new technologies like AI and big data are profoundly transforming legal service models, with machine intelligence beginning to assume the roles of practical and academic legal talents, even replacing auxiliary ones (Yang Xueke, 2018, as cited in Zi & Fu, 2025). This trend requires legal education to actively incorporate technological elements, cultivating students’ composite abilities to solve legal problems using new technologies. However, current philosophies for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era remain rooted in tradition; except for the cloud-based model, others fail to adequately absorb new technologies and ideas, making it difficult to foster students’ comprehensive literacy in analyzing and handling legal issues with advanced technological means.
Third, teaching philosophies lag behind the demands for applied rule-of-law talents, lacking interdisciplinary fusion. In the AI era, legal issues often involve cross-disciplinary intersections, but current models are mostly confined within law, lacking fusion with other disciplines, making it hard to cultivate students’ cross-boundary thinking and abilities to solve complex problems. The construction of a new liberal arts curriculum system must focus on the knowledge structure, ability structure, and literacy structure required for students to better adapt to current social development and future changes (Ma Xiao et al., 2021, as cited in Jiang & Fan, 2025).
2.2. Lack of Innovation in Teaching Content
Current content for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era is relatively limited, with the following main defects.
First, the legal functional domains covered by teaching content are limited. Currently, the ternary model is rarely applied in practice, and mainstream interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era focuses on litigation procedures, overly emphasizing simulations of traditional legal professions. This makes it difficult for students to experience non-litigation, legislative, and legal affairs roles during teaching. Zi and Fu (2025) point out that traditional moot court teaching is one-sided in its focus on the simulation of traditional legal professions.
Second, teaching content pays insufficient attention to cutting-edge technological legal issues. In the new era, emerging technologies like AI and the metaverse are profoundly impacting social production and life, bringing numerous new legal challenges, such as liability attribution for AI algorithms and governance of cybercrimes, which urgently require attention from the legal community (Jiang & Fan, 2025). However, current moot trial content remains in traditional legal domains, rarely involving emerging issues, lacking cross-disciplinary cultivation, and failing to prepare students for future legal challenges.
Third, case selections lack typicality and representativeness. Universities mostly select classic cases with simple facts and minor disputes, such as intentional homicide or intentional injury in criminal law, or contract and tort disputes in civil and commercial law. These have limited discussability and fail to reflect social hotspots or the latest developments in laws and regulations. Teachers designing cases should ensure the cases have a certain degree of controversy, making students feel that “public opinion is right, and opinion is right,” thus forcing them to face conflicting reasons for weighing (Xie, 2025).
2.3. Lack of Practicality in Teaching Methods
Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era aims to cultivate students’ legal practical abilities, including quickly extracting key points, formulating trial strategies, and conducting courtroom debates. This requires students to master relevant legal knowledge and apply it comprehensively, truly grasping it through learning, thinking, practicing, and gaining insight in practice. The ternary and cloud-based models genuinely involve students in practical operations but are rarely applied. The traditional and teacher-student interactive models, while formally simulating courtroom environments, struggle to recreate the tense confrontational atmosphere of real courts. Moreover, they overly emphasize procedural imitation, neglecting substantive training, affecting learning outcomes, and failing to meet the requirements for cultivating composite legal talents. As Zi and Fu (2025) observe, the traditional model and the teacher-student interaction model, although simulating the courtroom environment in form, are difficult to reproduce the tense confrontation situation of the actual courtroom.
2.4. Lack of Interactivity in Teaching Guidance
As scholars have noted, “The faculty team is the foundation for the development of legal education, the key to improving the quality of legal talent cultivation, and the traditional bottleneck in on-campus practical teaching for law majors” (Huang Jin et al., 2014, as cited in Zi & Fu, 2025). The composition of faculty teams and guidance methods in current interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era urgently need improvement.
First, guidance team compositions are monolithic. On the one hand, there is a lack of substantial participation from legal practitioners. Currently, instructors for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era mainly come from law faculties, with judges, prosecutors, and lawyers only participating in commentary stages, unable to provide firsthand practical guidance. On the other hand, there is a lack of support from cross-disciplinary experts. Legal practice involves multidisciplinary knowledge from society, psychology, economics, etc., and instructors with solely legal backgrounds struggle to provide comprehensive guidance. JIANG Wuzhen and FAN Haoning emphasize the need to introduce diverse and cutting-edge science and engineering faculty and to seek faculty with dual backgrounds in law and science/engineering (Jiang & Fan, 2025).
Second, guidance methods lack interactivity and participation. Currently, except for the teacher-student interactive model, guidance in other models is largely unidirectional, with students passively receiving information, insufficient interactive exchanges, leading to students’ lack of initiative and difficulty in full participation.
2.5. Lack of Equity in Teaching Resources
Currently, resources for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era vary significantly across Chinese universities. Taking the five universities in this study as examples, there are substantial differences in main instructors, invited judges, and partner units for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era across regions, primarily in three aspects (Zi & Fu, 2025).
First, there are significant disparities in the quality of resources for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era among different regions and universities. Developed areas in the north and east have richer teaching resources, including more diverse and professional instructors, high-quality judges, and partner units, whereas southern, central, and western universities have relatively scarce resources (Zi & Fu, 2025).
Second, there are differences in resource update speeds. Some universities can quickly update resources, such as T University in the east, which fully utilizes online platforms to incorporate emerging issues into the teaching content. Other universities update resources more slowly.
Third, the vast differences between east and west, north and south also indicate a certain closed nature in university law school teaching resources, failing to achieve full sharing and resulting in low resource utilization efficiency (Zi & Fu, 2025).
It is evident that current models of interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era have numerous defects in teaching philosophies, content, methods, guidance, and resources. Reforms and innovations are urgently needed to improve teaching quality, strengthen students’ practical abilities and comprehensive legal literacy, and adapt to the pressing demands for composite legal talents in building a rule-of-law society. The “Opinions on Strengthening Legal Education and Legal Theory Research in the New Era” explicitly requires “updating and improving the law professional curriculum system, and promoting the construction of law professional theoretical teaching courses and practical teaching courses as a whole” (General Office of the CPC Central Committee & General Office of the State Council, 2023). To address these challenges, it is imperative to update teaching philosophies towards innovation, integration, synergy, and sharing; enrich teaching content by broadening legal functional fields and integrating interdisciplinary knowledge; innovate teaching methods by strengthening second classroom activities and real-world practice; build a dual-teacher collaborative guidance mechanism; and establish a cloud-based moot court teaching platform to promote resource sharing (Zi & Fu, 2025). Concurrently, the development of AI legal studies must respect the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge between arts and sciences and emphasize the necessity of genuine integration of this knowledge in teaching (Jiang & Fan, 2025).
3. Pathways to Reshape Interdisciplinary Integration in Legal
Education in the AI Era
In early 2023, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the “Opinions on Strengthening Legal Education and Legal Theory Research in the New Era,” requiring updates and improvements to the legal professional curriculum system and integrated advancement of theoretical and practical teaching courses. To address existing issues in models of interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era, this paper proposes a five-in-one approach: updating teaching philosophies, enriching content, innovating methods, building a dual-mentor guidance collaboration mechanism, and constructing a cloud-based teaching platform for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era. This will further deepen legal education reform and adapt to the new requirements for legal talents in the AI era.
3.1. Updating Philosophies: Innovation, Integration, Collaboration, and Sharing
Reforms in interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era should clarify teaching philosophies, using philosophical innovation to drive content and form innovations. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era promotes multidisciplinary intersection and deep fusion through inheritance and innovation, intersection and fusion, collaboration and sharing, advancing the update and upgrade of traditional law. Based on this, this paper argues that interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era needs to uphold the teaching philosophies of “innovation, integration, collaboration, and sharing.”
First, innovation is the “new” essence of interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era. Scholars emphasize that understanding interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era requires attention to new research questions, methods, and theoretical perspectives. It needs to inherit traditional legal education, preserve its essence, and innovate teaching models on a foundation of orthodoxy.
Second, interdisciplinary fusion is the inevitable path for cultivating composite legal talents in the new era. Real-world legal issues are complex, often involving collisions and fusions of different disciplines, with emerging fields like AI and the metaverse posing new challenges and requirements for talent cultivation. A single legal discipline cannot fully grasp them; only by establishing a comprehensive knowledge system and forming systematic thinking can complex problems be better analyzed and solved.
Third, collaboration is the rightful meaning of mutual benefit and win-win. Legal education needs to strengthen ties with social practice departments, building collaboration mechanisms to provide students with higher-quality practical guidance, faculty, and venues for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era. In the context of the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation, cross-disciplinary and cross-field communication with other majors and industries is needed to grasp the pulse of era development.
Fourth, sharing is the inevitable requirement for optimizing social resource allocation. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era requires social resources such as cases, document templates, public trial videos, and practical work guidance. However, there are significant barriers to resource sharing among universities and between universities and other social departments. It is urgent to implement sharing philosophies, co-build resource interaction platforms for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era, promote communication and exchanges, and share case libraries and practical experience guidance micro-courses, providing students with abundant teaching resources.
However, the realization of “collaboration” and “sharing” faces significant institutional and motivational barriers. Universities and practical departments (courts, procuratorates, law firms) operate under different incentive structures and performance metrics. For practitioners, participating as mentors is time-consuming and may not be adequately recognized in their career advancement, leading to a lack of sustained motivation. For universities, formalizing such collaboration requires navigating complex bureaucratic procedures, establishing liability frameworks, and finding budgetary allocations for honorariums, which are nontrivial challenges.
3.2. Enriching Content: Expanding Domains and Interdisciplinary Fusion
Currently, interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era at various universities overly focuses on simulating traditional litigation professions and consolidating traditional legal theories, often selecting classic cases with simple facts and a single dispute focus. This not only limits simulated professions but also hinders knowledge integration and disciplinary fusion, failing to meet cultivation requirements for composite legal talents in the new era. Therefore, it is urgent to expand the functional domains covered by teaching, emphasize fusion with other disciplines, and introduce cutting-edge, typical cases to enrich content.
First, content for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era should expand to cover legal functional domains, learning from advanced experiences of ternary legal practice, divided teaching models, and providing practical opportunities in legal areas beyond litigation. By assuming roles such as procuratorial personnel, defenders, legal affairs staff, or legislators from different perspectives, students simulate litigation, provide legal services to enterprises, or conduct mock legislation, experiencing different legal professions and nurturing legal professional literacy and comprehensive abilities to solve real legal problems. This aligns with the original intent of reforms in the AI era and meets national requirements for cultivating high-quality, high-level, internationalized excellent legal talents.
Second, emphasizing fusion with other disciplines is an inevitable requirement for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era to adapt to the era of development. Scholars propose that legal education in the AI era should focus on interdisciplinary fusion, advancing new majors and directions integrating law and technology, deeply mining legal knowledge resources with scientific thinking, updating legal perspectives, and expanding research fields. In the digital era, content for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era should particularly emphasize fusion with technology, adapting to judicial intelligence trends, and intersecting with computer science to enhance students’ computer skills and abilities to use intelligent judicial platforms for retrieval and analysis. It should also introduce issues like discrimination and bias in AI applications, and citizen privacy and human rights infringements from facial recognition systems, to stimulate student interest and train their abilities to analyze and solve problems with legal thinking.
This also imposes requirements on case selection. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era should embody the characteristics of the digital era, highlight practical teaching features, and select real hotspot cases with typicality, controversy, and novelty. On one hand, select hotspot cases involving major crimes or legal revisions, such as bird poaching or Yu Huan cases; on the other, explore new cases like aiding information network criminal activities in recent criminal law, discrimination and bias in AI applications, and privacy and human rights issues arising from facial recognition. This stimulates student interest and trains legal thinking for problem analysis and solution. Additionally, select cases with rich dossier materials and complete evidence for student research, ensuring smooth interdisciplinary integration; for cases with obvious advantages for one party, appropriately modify them to provide a balanced debate space.
While content expansion is crucial, its implementation is constrained by faculty expertise and curriculum design rigidity. Most law school faculty are trained in traditional legal doctrines and may lack deep interdisciplinary knowledge, particularly in technology, to design and teach such integrated content effectively. Developing new syllabi and teaching materials for “law + technology” courses requires significant investment in faculty development and time, which may be hindered by existing tenure and promotion criteria that prioritize traditional legal scholarship over interdisciplinary curriculum development.
3.3. Innovative Methods: Extracurricular Activities and Hands-On Drills
Current interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era is mostly confined to classrooms, lacking practicality and freshness, failing to stimulate student interest and initiative, affecting teaching outcomes, and failing to meet requirements for cultivating composite legal talents. Interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era should optimize mock trial methods, enrich extracurricular activities, conduct training, achieve theory-practice fusion, and fully exercise students’ legal practical abilities.
First, optimize mock trials. On one hand, due to a lack of practical experience, students overly rely on written materials, leading to heavy performative traces and unclear confrontations between prosecution and defense. Thus, this paper suggests strengthening pre-guidance, such as leading students to observe real trials or inviting practitioners to share experiences. On the other hand, most mock trials occur in classrooms, lacking the solemn atmosphere of real courts, which affects outcomes. Therefore, it is suggested to build dedicated mock courtroom classrooms or collaborate with off-campus practice departments to establish teaching bases, restoring scenes as much as possible to recreate real trial atmospheres.
Second, conduct extracurricular activities. On-site visits to practice workplaces, auditing real trials, etc., enrich learning forms and enhance the intuitiveness of practical training. In the big data era, although technological revolutions have reduced regional development imbalances caused by past information and knowledge disparities, a lack of digital technology experiences, skills, and infrastructure can create new “digital divides.” Thus, it is urgent to conduct intelligent judicial training, enrich students’ digital technology knowledge reserves, and train the use of case tracking systems, file retrieval analysis systems, etc., cultivating “AI + law” composite talents (Jiang & Fan, 2025). Additionally, try novel methods like virtual reality (VR) mock courts or online simulation litigation platforms, allowing immersive experiences of emerging tech in legal practice and enhancing teaching engagement.
Third, collaborate with off-campus practice departments to establish teaching bases for hands-on drills. Drawing from ternary legal practice divided models, under instructor guidance, students handle real cases, provide enterprise legal services, or draft regulations, experiencing all legal practice stages, understanding and solving practical problems, and deeply comprehending legal norm applications in specific scenarios, thereby enhancing legal literacy and practical abilities.
Methodological innovations, especially those involving technology like VR platforms or access to intelligent judicial systems, and organizing off-site activities, face significant financial and logistical hurdles. Building a dedicated mock courtroom or acquiring VR equipment requires substantial capital investment. Furthermore, organizing visits and practical drills for large numbers of students involves costs for transportation, insurance, and coordination, which may be prohibitive for many institutions, particularly those outside well-funded metropolitan areas. The scalability of such resource-intensive methods is a major challenge.
3.4. Interactive Guidance: Building a Dual-Mentor Guidance Collaboration Mechanism
In May 2017, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized during an inspection of China University of Political Science and Law that barriers between universities and society must be broken, introducing high-quality practical teaching resources from actual work departments into universities and strengthening exchanges among legal educators, researchers, and practitioners. As a guided practical course enhancing students’ legal professional literacy, interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era imposes higher requirements on instructors’ comprehensive abilities. However, current interdisciplinary integration overly emphasizes procedural imitation, neglecting instructor guidance, with few university instructors possessing both teaching and practical attributes. Thus, it is urgent to emulate teacher-student interactive models: on one hand, college instructors guide theoretical key points of legal relationship analysis in classrooms; on the other, they collaborate with off-campus practice departments to build dual-mentor mechanisms, establish industry-academia-research bases, provide visitation learning opportunities, and achieve social resource sharing. Senior off-campus judges, prosecutors, and lawyers should be invited as mentors to participate in teaching, promoting collaboration between off-campus practitioners and full-time faculty, providing dual-mentor guidance, and further improving the quality and outcomes of interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era, thus better meeting the cultivation demands for legal talents in the new era.
The primary barriers to building a sustainable dual-mentor guidance collaboration mechanism are institutional and financial. Institutionally, there is a mismatch in incentives and recognition. For busy legal practitioners, mentoring students is an additional burden that is rarely compensated adequately or recognized professionally. For universities, creating formal, long-term partnerships involves complex negotiations over liability, intellectual property, and administrative oversight. Financially, a sustainable model requires a dedicated budget for practitioner honorariums, which many law schools may lack. Without addressing these incentive structures and securing stable funding, such mechanisms risk being ad hoc and inconsistent, limiting their effectiveness and reach.
3.5. Creating Platforms: Constructing a Cloud-Based Teaching Platform for Interdisciplinary Integration in Legal Education in the AI Era
Virtual platforms for legal practical teaching help break tangible barriers between schools and society, providing effective pathways for off-campus high-quality resources to enter campuses and promoting resource sharing and flow. To advance digital law construction, Zhejiang University built a university-level cross-disciplinary platform, facilitating exchanges between law and computer science faculty and students on national key R&D projects, conducting cross-academic research, and boosting talent cultivation convergence. Inspired by this, the cloud-based model uses online vocational education platforms for interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era, adapting to “Internet + education” new forms and requirements, innovating methods and tools, and providing new ideas for university interdisciplinary integration in the AI era. Constructing a cloud-based platform not only promotes resource sharing but also facilitates exchanges among universities, disciplines, faculty, students, and relevant practice experts.
First, it facilitates the coordination and sharing of teaching resources. On one hand, build resource interaction platforms using networked technologies to optimize the allocation and efficient use of dispersed resources like practical experiences, typical cases, syllabi, and videos, allowing students to fully utilize existing resources and deeply understand actual trial processes, thus improving teaching quality. On the other hand, encourage inter-disciplinary cooperation by organizing activities like AI lectures and seminars via online platforms, promoting disciplinary fusion and cultivating students’ comprehensive abilities.
Second, promote exchanges among law students from various universities through platforms, such as organizing mock trial competitions and sharing experiences. This not only breaks barriers between universities and departments, promoting inter-university exchanges, but also enhances student interest and learning outcomes.
In the information era, online education resource development brings new opportunities for reforms in interdisciplinary integration in legal education in the AI era. Coordinating online and offline resources to innovate teaching models can improve teaching quality.
The construction and maintenance of a sophisticated, secure, and user-friendly cloud-based platform present significant financial and technical challenges. The initial development cost is high, requiring expertise in software engineering and instructional design. Ongoing maintenance, server costs, cybersecurity measures, and technical support constitute substantial recurring expenses. Furthermore, interoperability and data standardization across different universities and legal departments are major hurdles. Resource sharing also raises concerns about data privacy, particularly with sensitive case information, and intellectual property rights over contributed materials. Without a clear business model, sustainable funding, and robust data governance protocols, the platform’s long-term viability and security are uncertain.
4. Conclusion
General Secretary Xi Jinping’s inspection remarks underscore the imperative of building a legal discipline system with Chinese characteristics and self-confidence. The proposed model for interdisciplinary legal education in the AI era is a direct response to this call. It moves beyond the application of established pedagogical methods by fundamentally leveraging the core capabilities of artificial intelligence to create a distinctively modern educational paradigm.
The model’s uniqueness lies not merely in digitizing traditional tools but in harnessing AI for personalized curriculum design, where algorithms analyze student performance and career aspirations to recommend tailored interdisciplinary learning paths. It introduces AI-simulated complex scenarios that go beyond conventional mock trials, immersing students in dynamic, data-rich environments involving cyber law, algorithmic governance, and ethical dilemmas that require real-time analysis and interdisciplinary knowledge application. Furthermore, the model employs data-driven competency assessment, using AI to evaluate not just legal reasoning but also interdisciplinary integration skills, critical thinking, and adaptability—providing nuanced feedback for continuous improvement.
In essence, the model transforms the “AI-era” from a backdrop into an active, shaping force. It ensures that the solutions to the fundamental questions of “for whom, what, to whom, and how to teach” are answered with the tools and perspectives unique to our time. As AI technologies evolve, this approach will continue to deepen, making significant contributions to cultivating high-quality legal talent equipped with Chinese wisdom and practice for the global rule-of-law civilization.
Project
2025 University-Level Higher Education Teaching Reform Project of Guangzhou University of Applied Science and Technology: “AI-Enabled Reform and Practice of the ‘Three-Stage and Five-Dimension’ Teaching Model for the Law Course ‘Moot Court’” (Project Number: 2025JG020); Phase Achievements of the 2022 Guangzhou College of Applied Science and Technology Higher Education Teaching Reform Project “Research on the Hybrid Practice Teaching Model of Law Majors in Digital Era Universities” (Project Number: 2022JG014).