Conference on Data Science and Law; Chapel Hill, NC; Spring 2020

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Data science, particularly via artificial intelligence (AI) and/or machine learning, is becoming increasingly omnipresent in our lives and culture, in the way we interact with each other, in the way we get goods and services, and in the way our personal information is used and shared. In the legal field, data science is changing how judicial and governmental decisions are made and, more broadly, how law is practiced. NSF has recognized the impact that computer and data science (as well as other disciplines including engineering and social sciences) can have on the law. Collaboration between legal professionals, data science experts, and other domain experts is needed to establish evaluative frameworks that can bring the advanced quantitative reasoning made possible through data science to the domain of law. This conference award will be used to organize a two-day workshop—with representatives from law, data science, engineering, and social science and including students from these fields—to focus interdisciplinary perspectives on four to five broad data science questions in the law. As a result of this workshop, teams will form to develop innovative research proposals aimed at developing data science solutions to legal problems through future collaborations and proposals for submission to NSF and other funding agencies and foundations committed to the scientifically valid practice of law. Those proposals in turn may lead to data science tools that, for example, allow for more efficient open-source legal research, create methods for authenticating digital evidence, or evaluate algorithms for accuracy or bias. Additionally, the proposed workshop will represent the first step towards developing an interdisciplinary community of data scientists, legal professionals, and other domain experts. An essential outcome of this workshop is that these communities understand the profound impact they share as the nation’s legal, academic, and professional communities move toward more data-driven decisions regarding legal outcomes, legal implications, and legal impacts of data analyses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.