Hallucinations, Hype, and Hope: Rebecca Fordon on AI in Legal Research

In this episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, we sit down with Rebecca Fordon — law librarian, professor, and board member of the Free Law Project — to talk about how generative AI is transforming legal research, education, and the meaning of “expertise.”

Rebecca helps us cut through the hype and ask harder questions: What problem are we really trying to solve with AI? Why are we using certain tools, and do we even know what data they’re built on?

We talk about:

🔹 How AI is reshaping the practice of legal research and what it means for the next generation of lawyers.
🔹 Why hallucinated case law and “certainty amplification” reveal deeper problems of trust and transparency.
🔹 The tension between speed and substance, and how “saving time” can actually shift where thinking happens.
🔹 The expert pipeline problem: what happens when AI replaces the messy, formative parts of learning?
🔹 How law librarians (and educators everywhere) are taking on the role of translators, bridging human judgment and machine outputs.
🔹 The open-access movement in law and how the Free Law Project is democratizing legal data.

At its heart, this episode is about reclaiming curiosity, caution, and critical thinking in a field that depends on precision, and remembering that faster isn’t always smarter.

Learn more:
🔗 Free Law Project: https://free.law

🔗 AI Law Librarians: https://ailawlibrarians.com

🔗 Aaron Tay's musings about librarianship: https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/

🔗 Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide: https://refusinggenai.wordpress.com/

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