Law students are now using smart glasses that photograph exam questions and read AI-generated answers into their earbuds, smearing Vaseline over laptop cameras to defeat monitoring software while using their phones to generate perfect responses in seconds, and submitting papers that may be entirely AI-produced with no way for professors to detect it.
Josh Blackman, centennial chair of constitutional law at South Texas College of Law in Houston and contributing editor to Civeotus Outlook, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain why he is returning to oral examinations and to assess the Supreme Court cases expected before the term ends this week.
Blackman said the only way he can verify that a student actually knows the material is to have them sit in front of him with no devices and talk. He plans to implement oral examinations beginning with midterms, starting at roughly ten percent of the grade to test the format. Students will receive the questions in advance so there are no surprises, with ten index cards placed on his desk from which the student will draw one at random and answer it, followed by his own follow-up questions. He said five to ten minutes is enough to determine whether someone genuinely understands the material. He acknowledged legitimate concerns from colleagues about anonymity in grading and student anxiety, but said anonymous grading loses its purpose when you cannot determine whether the student or ChatGPT wrote the exam in the first place.
He described the approach as going backward to go forward, returning to methods used by the Greeks and Romans for centuries because modern technology has made traditional written examinations unreliable. He said handwriting is not a viable alternative either, since current students are essentially incapable of producing legible handwritten work, a skill that has deteriorated beyond the point of usefulness. He plans to report back next year on how the experiment goes.
On the Supreme Court docket, Blackman offered predictions across several major pending cases. On transgender athletes, he expects a clear conservative victory, saying even Justice Kagan likely recognizes that federal civil rights law was designed to maintain separate athletic competitions for men and women and was never intended to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports. On the president’s power to fire members of independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, a question that dates back to FDR, he expects Trump to win. On the Federal Reserve case involving Lisa Cook, whom Trump attempted to remove, he expects Trump to lose because the court will treat the Fed as categorically different from other agencies and simply leave it alone.
On birthright citizenship, which Blackman identified as the biggest remaining case, he expects Trump to lose and said it will not be close. He said if the question were being written on a blank slate, the constitutional argument favors Trump’s position, at least in part. He distinguished between two categories: children of temporary visitors like birth tourists, whose parents never intended to establish permanent residence, and children of people who entered illegally but intend to stay. He said the birth tourism case is strong, since a temporary visitor has not established the mutual consent relationship that the Fourteenth Amendment’s subject to the jurisdiction thereof language implies. The illegal immigration case is harder because when the amendment was ratified in 1868, modern immigration law did not exist, meaning people could essentially arrive and remain without being subject to deportation, making the mapping of an 1868 constitutional provision onto contemporary immigration enforcement genuinely complicated.
Despite those analytical distinctions, Blackman said over a century of executive branch practice treating anyone born on American soil as a citizen regardless of parental status has created a body of precedent that the current court is unlikely to overturn. He said the practical concern about potentially jeopardizing the citizenship of millions of people whose parents were not citizens at the time of their birth is probably too much for the court to accept, even if the original constitutional text supports a more limited reading.
On the broader dynamic of federal judges blocking executive action, Blackman said the system has become unsustainable, with virtually every Trump administration action, from the Kennedy Center to the Reflecting Pool to voter integrity measures, ending up before a judge somewhere who effectively dictates executive policy from a courthouse in Boston or Rhode Island. He said the Supreme Court is a reactionary institution that does not intervene quickly but predicted that over the next year many of these lower court rulings will reach the high court, which will eventually push back against judges who believe they are saving the world from fascism rather than performing their judicial function. He cited one judge in Boston who has already been reversed twice by the Supreme Court in the same case and is likely headed for a third reversal, noting that some judges simply do not take the hint.