John Bliss
Associate Professor of Law
Office 455M, Frank H. Ricketson Law Bldg., 2255 East Evans Ave. Denver, CO 80210
Specialization(s)
Legal Ethics and Legal Profession, Property Law
Professional Biography
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’ efforts to advance social change and the public interest. Through interviews, surveys, archives, and ethnography, he examines legal careers from the initial training in law school to lawyers’ greatest impacts within social movements. Since 2021, 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. He has extended this project in several directions, including a Mandarin-language study of Chinese lawyers-in-training, a multinational survey of students adapting to the Covid pandemic, and a qualitative project on students engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement. His findings suggest the need for first-year curriculum to better support public-interest-oriented students. At Denver Law, he has developed evidence-based programming including the 1L Public Good Program, which he co-directs with Professor Alexi Freeman.
Professor Bliss’s 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 work on law and AI includes a study of legal education drawing from a national faculty survey. He also runs a blog covering the latest empirics on AI’s advancing legal capabilities (see https://ailawempirics.substack.com). He teaches two courses on these topics: “AI and the Future of the Legal Profession” and “AI Safety: Law, Policy, and Practice.” He has also contributed to AI policymaking as an appointed member of the Colorado Senate AI Impact Task Force and as 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.
Prior to joining the Denver Law faculty, Professor Bliss completed his J.D. and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.
Degree(s)
- PhD, 2016, University of California Berkeley
- JD, 2010, University of California Berkeley
- Double BA, 2004, University of Washington
Featured Publications
Teaching Law in the Age of Generative AI, Jurimetrics 111 (2024).
Existential Advocacy: Lawyering for AI Safety and the Future of Humanity, 37.1 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 39 (2024).
Pass for Some, Fail for Others: An Empirical Analysis of Law School Grading Changes in the Early Covid-19 Pandemic (with David Sandomierski and Tayzia Collesso), 56.2 UBC L. Rev. 605 (2023).
Rebellious Lawyers for Fair Housing: The Lost Scientific Model of the Early NAACP, Wisc. L. Rev. 1433 (2021).
Becoming Global Lawyers? A Comparative Study of Civic Professionalism, 46(3) Law & Soc. Inquiry 1-24 (2021).
The Legal Ethics of Secret Client Recordings, 33 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 55 (2020).
From Idealists to Hired Guns? An Empirical Analysis of “Public Interest Drift” in Law School, 51 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1973 (2018).
Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students and New Lawyers in a Period of Market Crisis, 42 Law & Soc. Inquiry 855 (2017).
