John Bliss

John Bliss is an associate professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and affiliate faculty at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. His research offers an empirical lens on lawyers and the legal profession, examining efforts to advance social change and the public interest. Through interviews, surveys, archives, and ethnography, he takes a deep look at lawyers’ careers, from their initial training in law school to their greatest impacts as leaders of social movements. Since 2020, he has concentrated on how artificial intelligence is transforming these dimensions of legal practice and education.

Professor Bliss’s early research traced the trajectory of idealistic law students through their legal education and early career. He expanded this inquiry with a Mandarin-language study of Chinese lawyers-in-training, a multi-national survey of students adapting to the Covid pandemic, and a four-school study of students engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement. His findings suggest the need for first-year curricular reform to better support public-interest-oriented students. In response, he has developed evidence-based programming at Harvard Law and Denver Law, including the 1L Public Good Program that he co-directs with Dean Alexi Freeman.

His research on social-change lawyering examines the role of lawyers within social movements. He has a particular interest in “legal mobilization”—the process by which movements turn to lawyers and legal strategies. This work spans studies of the early NAACP campaign for fair housing, the first generation of animal rights lawyers, and the rising global movement to mitigate AI’s catastrophic risks (forthcoming with Stanford University Press).

His current focus on legal AI includes a study of legal education with large language models based on a national faculty survey and a review of AI-integrated educational experiments. He runs a blog providing empirical updates on AI’s advancing legal capabilities (see http://ai-lawyering.blog) and is currently writing an article on methods of forecasting AI’s future role in legal practice.

Professor Bliss instructs law students and lawyers on these topics in a DU seminar called AI and the Future of the Legal Profession and as a founding faculty member of the Oak Academy for AI in the Legal Profession. Additionally, he contributes to AI policymaking as an appointed member of the Colorado Senate AI Impact Task Force and an affiliate with the Institute for Law & AI, a world-leading think tank on AI’s legal challenges.

His scholarship appears in law reviews and leading outlets for empirical research on the legal profession, including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Jurimetrics, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Stanford University Press.

At DU, Professor Bliss teaches courses on professional responsibility, legal AI, and property. Prior to joining the Denver Law faculty, he completed his J.D. and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Law School. He belongs to several academic associations relating to the interdisciplinary study of law and serves on the board of the New Legal Realism project.

View CV

• PhD, 2016, University of California Berkeley
• JD, 2010, University of California Berkeley
• Double BA, 2004, University of Washington