DASS: Legally & Locally Legitimate: Designing & Evaluating Software Systems to Advance Equal Opportunity

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School districts struggle to increase equal educational opportunity and avoid racial isolation for their students. Many districts use a school-assignment software system to further these goals; today, more than 100 school districts across the United States have adopted school-assignment software systems. Some of these systems have been subject to legal challenges, both successful and unsuccessful, to the approach the school districts used to advance equal opportunity. This study examines how best to ensure that these software systems are designed to respond to legal and economic constraints and democratic community participation in order to ensure both legal compliance and legitimacy in the eyes of the community. Improving these software systems will affect hundreds of thousands of students’ access to education. Finally, this work will contribute to the rapidly growing scholarship on equity challenges associated with software systems and artificial intelligence, which is tied to a growing number of legislative proposals regarding decisions made by software. Organizations increasingly see promise in advancing their policy goals, such as equal opportunity, using software systems that can implement pre-defined procedures objectively, in contexts such as education, employment, housing, voting rights, etc. These software systems must comply with complex and ambiguous requirements, and their success relies in part on the legitimacy of the decisions that they make in the eyes of policy makers, users, and authorities. Legal rules, however, are often ambiguous without clear criteria for compliance. Additionally, when no outside metric of fairness exists, how do people perceive whether a decision is just? This project relies on two theories in the field of law and society -- legal endogeneity theory and procedural justice theory -– to study how to actively involve users and policy makers in designing mechanisms for accountable software systems. It pursues a generalizable five-step method to design Legal and Locally Legitimate (L3) software systems. The research team will study and develop the method in the context of a partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District, where it will assist in the redesign of that district's student-assignment software system.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.