Is Virtual Reality Ready for Mainstream Legal Education?

p strongVirtual reality remains a niche tool in legal education, but courtroom simulation gives schools a concrete use case around which to test it./strong/p p Primary Research Group surveyed 103 faculty members at more than 60 law schools. About 4% used virtual reality regularly. Faculty at top-20 law schools reported the highest rates of daily and monthly use, and men were slightly more likely than women to use VR in teaching or research. Among male faculty, 6.67% used courtroom-simulation technology in class./p p The low adoption rate argues for focused pilots rather than expensive institution-wide deployment. Potential applications include courtroom procedure, witness examination, negotiation, crime-scene reconstruction and access to environments that would be difficult to visit. Each requires clear learning objectives novelty alone is not evidence of educational value./p p Schools should compare VR with lower-cost alternatives such as video, role play and desktop simulations. Evaluation should cover student preparation, realism, accessibility, motion sensitivity, technical support and whether performance improves outside the simulated environment. Shared equipment and scheduled modules may be more practical than individual headsets for every student./p p VR is ready for experimentation, not automatic scale. The winning applications will be those where immersion changes what students can observe or practice&mdashnot those that reproduce an ordinary lecture inside a headset./p p  /p