Pictured below are the short-essay questions in my module on “The Common Law”. The first question asks students to explain what did the great North American jurist and legal scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes mean when he wrote, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” perhaps the most famous quote about the common law of all time.
Below the fold is ChatGPT’s response to this very question:
Final grade: C+/B-.
An “A” answer, by contrast, would provide specific examples of how the common law has evolved over time, so next I asked GPT-3 to do just that, and here is how she replied:
I could not resist, so I also asked about the Law of Property:
I have to confess that, for an undergraduate survey course like mine, I would give that essay an A+!
prior probability 