Law professors should think twice before banishing laptops from their classrooms.

That's the takeaway of a new law review article challenging the popular notion that the siren call of Facebook and Reddit are too tempting for students to resist in class, and the widely held view that taking notes by hand is a more effective way to learn.

Laptop users in Ruth Colker's constitutional law class at Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law earned comparable grades to those who voluntarily eschewed computers in class, according to her article in the Cardozo Law Review, titled “Universal Design: Stop Banning Laptops!” 

Colker recommends that law professors allow their students to decide for themselves whether to use laptops on the grounds that students learn best in different ways. At the same time, professors should make clear that using the internet for nonclass purposes in strictly prohibited.

“I'm reluctant to make a choice for my students for all sorts of reasons,” Colker said in an interview. “The data suggests that students seem to make the right choice for themselves.”

Not only that, but across-the-board laptop bans force students with disabilities who need to use laptops to out themselves to professors and classmates by seeking exceptions, said Colker, an expert in disability law.

There is no shortage of opinions when it comes to laptops in the law classroom, and outright bans are not uncommon. (U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch didn't allow laptops as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado School of Law, for example.)

A 2013 study found that second- and third-year law students are more likely than their first-year counterparts to goof off on their laptops during class, while a separate study in 2012 found that second-year law students spent 42 percent of their class time using their laptops for nonacademic purposes.

Some professors worry that laptops create a less engaging classroom environment with students furiously typing instead of participating in discussions, while others cite research showing that they retain more information when taking notes by hand.

Colker said she became interested in the laptop question three years ago when a videotape of one of her small section classes captured a student watching a cooking show as she taught.

“I was horrified,” she said. “I thought, 'I need to do something.'”

Her concern wasn't so much for the student watching the show—he lost his laptop privileges—but for the others around him who were also distracted, she said.

Colker introduced a policy whereby any student who wants to use a laptop in class must request permission in writing and pledge not to use the internet for nonacademic purposes. She also shares research showing that those who take notes by hand tend to outperform those who take verbatim notes on their computers.

Colker then conducted a study of the 57 students in her spring 2016 constitutional law class. Among them, 25 requested the use of a laptop while 32 did not. She assumed that the laptop users would underperform based on published studies, but they did just as well as the nonlaptop users. Those results held even when Colker took credentials, including her students' scores on the Law School Admission Test and undergraduate grades, into account.

Conversations with her students revealed that some opted not to use laptops because they knew they couldn't resist browsing the internet or checking emails, while others who used laptops said they preferred to be able to access course materials online during class and could more easily create study outlines by typing their notes.

In the end, law professors should trust their students to know what is best for them but should also lay out firm ground rules for laptop use, Colker said.

“In law, we are always teaching our students that answers are murky, there are two sides to most issues, and one needs to assess facts with care,” her article reads. “A professor's reflexive 'no-laptop' policy fails to hold us to these high standards.”