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There’s been a lot of buzz lately about AI policies and whether they should prohibit or encourage generative AI use among legal practitioners and law students. Many policies land at one pole or the other. Early on, the restrictive end dominated, with rules built around preventing data exposure and warning about hallucinations. We’re still seeing some, most notably UC Berkeley School of Law’s much-debated policy, which, while not an outright ban, is framed almost entirely around what students…
Continue Reading Most AI Policies Ask the Wrong Question: It’s Not Whether AI Is Used, but What Cognitive Function It’s Replacing

The UW Law Library is marking National Library Week this year with a milestone: the 20th anniversary of our Faculty READ Poster series.
2026 READ PosterYou’ve likely seen READ posters before—those images of celebrities holding their favorite books, produced by the American Library Association. Our version features UW Law School faculty and staff. Since the first posters debuted in 2006, dozens of faculty and staff have been featured, each holding a book that has sparked their interest or shaped their…
Continue Reading Happy National Library Week: Celebrating 20 Years of Faculty READ Posters at the UW Law Library

The Universities of Wisconsin recently launched ASAP: AI Skills Access Passport, a free, seven-episode video series designed to help the general public build foundational AI literacy. I thought it was well done.  Each episode runs about two minutes. The series is sponsored by UW Credit Union.

Although ASAP is aimed at a general audience, it’s worth a look for legal professionals — and worth passing along to clients. The seven episodes cover:

  • What AI Actually Does — how

…
Continue Reading UW System Launches Free AI Literacy Series: The AI Skills Access Passport

Here is the latest faculty scholarship from the University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Papers series via SSRN.

Joshua Braver (UW Law), Deference Due? “Considers” and the Insurrection Act
Braver offers the first sustained statutory interpretation of the Insurrection Act, the principal authority for deploying military force on American streets to enforce federal law. The prevailing view, reflected in recent circuit court decisions, gives the president “great deference” in determining whether deployment conditions are met. Braver pushes…
Continue Reading Recent UW Law Faculty Scholarship: Constitutional Theory, Court Reform, Executive Power, Antitrust, Surveillance, and AI Prompting

With Iran’s nuclear sanctions in the news, Sunil Rao, Foreign and International Law Librarian at UW Law Library, has put together some helpful research sources covering the history, the sanctions framework, and the snapback mechanism now at the center of a dispute in the UN Security Council.
The Council recently held an open briefing on the work of the  UN 1737 Sanctions Committee, established in 2006 to monitor Iran’s nuclear activities. Russia and China objected to the session, arguing…
Continue Reading UN Sanctions on Iran’s Nuclear Program: Researching the Snapback Mechanism

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — signed into law in 2025 as P.L. 119-21 — made significant changes to federal tax law, and practitioners are still working through the implications. If you’re trying to get up to speed, Jenny Zook, Reference & Instructional Services Librarian at the UW Law Library and current chair of the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin’s Public Relations Committee, has written a timely guide for the State Bar of Wisconsin’s InsideTrack.
Her…
Continue Reading Tax Research on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: A Guide to Key Resources

WI Law in Action podcastA recent episode of the Wisconsin Law in Action podcast features Amanda White Eagle, Director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center (GLILC) at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Host Kris Turner of the UW Law Library draws out a wide-ranging conversation about how the Center works with Tribal nations, students, and practitioners to support Indigenous law across Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. The Law Library’s close partnership with the GLILC is evident throughout, from joint…
Continue Reading Amanda White Eagle on the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center and Expanding Access to Tribal Law on WI Law in Action Podcast

Need Help Researching Law in a Foreign Jurisdiction?  The University of Wisconsin Law Library maintains a growing collection of country-specific legal research guides designed to help you get started. Each guide provides an introduction to a country’s legal system and government structure, and directs you to key primary and secondary sources — including constitutions, legislation, case law, legal journals, and more — available through the Law Library and online.
Whether you’re working on a comparative law issue or simply…
Continue Reading Need Help Researching Law in a Foreign Jurisdiction? Check out UW Law Library’s Country-specific Legal Research Guides

Last summer, I received an email from Academia.edu with a link to an AI-generated podcast it had created based on an article I wrote about law faculty scholarly visibility. I listened, and I wasn’t impressed. The AI narrator mischaracterized my arguments and even fabricated a plug for Academia.edu’s platform as though I had said it. I wrote up my evaluation in a previous WisBlawg post, comparing it to a podcast I generated myself using Google’s NotebookLM. The…
Continue Reading From WisBlawg to the Chronicle of Higher Education: A Closer Look at AI-Generated Media for Promoting Scholarly Work

I recently discovered BookBub, a free service that sends daily personalized emails featuring discounted and free ebooks. After a quick signup, you select the genres that interest you—legal thrillers, science fiction, biography, history, fantasy, whatever you prefer. Each morning, you get an email with curated book recommendations in your chosen categories, most priced at 99 cents to a few dollars, with some completely free.
How It Works
An editorial team picks the selections, so you’re not sorting through…
Continue Reading BookBub: A Free Tool for Finding Discounted Ebooks

WisconsinEye, Wisconsin’s nonprofit public affairs network is back online for the month of February after going dark for about seven weeks due to a lack of funding.

On Monday, the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization (JCLO) unanimously approved a $50,000 cash infusion for the short term as they continue to work on a longer-term deal.

An Assembly committee is preparing to consider a bill Tuesday that would provide a longer term solution. Assembly Bill 816 proposes granting WisconsinEye…
Continue Reading WisconsinEye is Back while Legislature Considers Long Term Solution

WI Law in Action podcastThe latest episode of the Wisconsin Law in Action podcast features Professor Joshua Braver discussing his research on a particularly thorny question: when should military officers disobey orders that are lawful but unethical?
Photo of Josh BraverBraver’s recent paper, Disobeying Lawful But Unethical Orders in the Army, explores what happens when following the law conflicts with the military’s professional code—issues that go to the heart of civilian control of the armed forces and democratic governance.
Origins of the Research
The research…
Continue Reading Joshua Braver Examines When Military Officers Should Disobey Orders on WI Law in Action Podcast

The latest episode of the Wisconsin Law in Action podcast features Elizabeth Manriquez, Head of Reference and Scholarly Communication at the UW Law Library, discussing her chapter in the book Attorneys in the Baseball Hall of Fame: A Collection of Biographical Essays.

Liz’s chapter focuses on Bowie Kent Kuhn, who served as the fifth commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1969 to 1984. As she explains in the podcast, Kuhn was “one of the most polarizing figures…
Continue Reading The Polarizing Legacy of Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kent Kuhn

Each January, the UW Law School offers a series of Ethics CLE seminars. Once again, I have the pleasure of presenting on GenAI with my Law Library colleague, Kris Turner.
If you’re interested in attending this live virtual session or one of the other sessions in the series, you may register here.
Session 1: Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026, 12-1 p.m. CT
Three Rules That Change Your Life with Margaret Raymond, dean emeritus and Warren P. Knowles Chair, professor…
Continue Reading UW Law School Winter Ethics CLE Seminar Series Returns January 27-29

Legal work runs on documents. Case files, contracts, discovery materials, correspondence – they accumulate. Whether you’re building a timeline from scattered dates, searching for contradictions in witness statements, or extracting key clauses from multiple agreements, the process is often slow, meticulous, and time consuming.
In my recent Wisconsin Lawyer article, “NotebookLM for Lawyers: AI That Focuses on Your Documents”, I explore a different approach to AI in legal practice—one that focuses exclusively on your documents rather than pulling…
Continue Reading NotebookLM for Lawyers: AI That Focuses on Your Documents

Have you ever been frustrated that some important websites don’t offer email alerts or RSS feeds? Manually keeping track of changes can be very time-consuming. Fortunately, website monitoring tools solve this problem by automatically watching pages and sending notifications when changes occur.
There are many website monitoring tools available, each with different features and capabilities. While there are multiple options available, I heard the most good things about Distill and Visualping so I gave them both a try.
Continue Reading Monitoring Webpage Changes with Visualping