Teaching That Connects

Grounding the Future

By grounding emerging technologies in enduring legal principles, Faith Sparr equips students to navigate AI with clarity, context, and critical thinking.

In an era where artificial intelligence evolves by the hour, one might expect teaching courses focused on AI and the law to be a frantic race to keep up with the latest software updates or legal rulings. However, for attorney and instructor Faith Sparr, the secret to teaching lies not in chasing the latest headlines, but in anchoring the future to the foundational principles of the past.

At the University of Michigan School of Information, Sparr finds a unique motivation in her students. Unlike traditional law or communications programs, UMSI students aren't just studying these systems, they’re building them. "I consider that the SI students might be building the very systems which we are interrogating in my classes," Sparr says. 

A common critique of tech law is that it moves too slowly for the internet. Sparr disagrees, arguing that while the language of technology changes, the themes of the law remain universal. To illustrate this, she takes her students back nearly a century to a 1928 Fourth Amendment case, Olmstead v. United States, involving physical wiretapping.

In that case, Justice Brandeis famously dissented, foreseeing a world where technology would provide law enforcement with increasingly intrusive means of surveillance. "He couldn't foresee in 1928 all the technological advances that would come," Sparr explains. "But he knew they would come. If one has that clarity of principle, how the technology works and changes is factually important, but the principles remain the same." By helping students develop this "clarity of principles," Sparr ensures they are equipped to handle any technological shift.

Sparr’s classroom is centered on a case-based approach, a departure for many students who have never read a full court decision. This method challenges them to become critical readers, dissecting how judges rely on precedent and which facts they choose to emphasize or ignore.

"There is a real skill to engaging with the case law process," she says. "Even if they never read another case again, they will have furthered critical thinking skills, which is always a win in my book."

This critical engagement extends to the most polarizing topics of our day, from hate speech to political communication. To keep discussions civil and productive, Sparr often utilizes historical distance, using cases from the WWI era, or even the late 1970s. This allows students to see the development of legal doctrines without the immediate heat of modern politics. On the rare occasion that a class goes silent, Sparr isn't afraid to take up the opposing view herself, sometimes engaging in what she comically describes as a "full-blown argument with myself" to spark student participation.

When looking at the future, Sparr points to the looming battles over AI training and copyright. While many assume training AI on public data is "slam dunk" fair use, Sparr warns that the acquisition of that content could become far more complicated. She expects copyright owners to begin "walling off" content using digital property claims and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Whether tracking tort claims against AI systems or navigating the Copyright Office's refusal to protect solely AI-generated content, Sparr’s courses prepare students for a world where "cultural policy" is being rewritten in real-time. As Sparr bridges the gap between 1920s case law and 2020s neural networks, she remains a student herself. Despite her 20 years of teaching at Michigan, Sparr insists that the learning is a two-way street. "Every day I teach, I learn from them," she says.