How to build a more open justice system

Pah, Adam R.; Schwartz, David L.; Sanga, Sarath; Clopton, Zachary D.; DiCola, Peter; Mersey, Rachel Davis; Alexander, Charlotte; Hammond, Kristian J.; Amaral, Luı́s A. Nunes

doi:10.1126/science.aba6914

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…An example involves public judicial records: aggregate information is required to identify inconsistencies, biases, etc. in the judicial process [6]. Interested people (e.g., academic researchers) could join together to query a data set to see if the aggregate information is of interest to the group, but without getting the data itself.…”

Section: The Challenge Of Protected Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Privacy and data balkanization: circumventing the barriers

Huberman¹,

Hogg

2021

AI Ethics

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The rapid growth in digital data forms the basis for a wide range of new services and research, e.g., large-scale medical studies. At the same time, increasingly restrictive privacy concerns and laws are leading to significant overhead in arranging for sharing or combining different data sets to obtain these benefits. For new applications, where the benefit of combined data is not yet clear, this overhead can inhibit organizations from even trying to determine whether they can mutually benefit from sharing their data. In this paper, we discuss techniques to overcome this difficulty by employing private information transfer to determine whether there is a benefit from sharing data and whether there is room to negotiate acceptable prices. These techniques involve cryptographic protocols. While currently considered secure, these protocols are potentially vulnerable to the development of quantum technology, particularly for ensuring privacy over significant periods of time into the future. To mitigate this concern, we describe how developments in practical quantum technology can improve the security of these protocols.

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Section: The Challenge Of Protected Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Privacy and data balkanization: circumventing the barriers

Huberman¹,

Hogg

2021

AI Ethics

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“…One of the last domains to enter the digitization era is that of legal studies. In recent years, despite the fact that there are still some barriers that prevent open access to digital court records [4], there has been a steady increase in the availability of digital documents related to court activities (such as judicial decisions or processes, especially in the US and Europe) and legal processes in general [5]. In fact, despite some reluctance to incorporate evidence-based methodologies in the study of legal processes [6][7][8], some voices have advocated for systematic and quantitative approaches for which the availability of digital legal documents is crucial [4,[8][9][10][11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, despite the fact that there are still some barriers that prevent open access to digital court records [4], there has been a steady increase in the availability of digital documents related to court activities (such as judicial decisions or processes, especially in the US and Europe) and legal processes in general [5]. In fact, despite some reluctance to incorporate evidence-based methodologies in the study of legal processes [6][7][8], some voices have advocated for systematic and quantitative approaches for which the availability of digital legal documents is crucial [4,[8][9][10][11]. Recently, systemic, computational approaches have been able to start extracting and analyzing large corpora of judicial decisions [7,12], which has enabled the study of the use and propagation of precedent through the network of citations between judicial decisions [11,[13][14][15][16][17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socially disruptive periods and topics from information-theoretical analysis of judicial decisions

Lluc

Piga²,

Garcia-Teruel³

et al. 2023

EPJ Data Sci.

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Laws and legal decision-making regulate how societies function. Therefore, they evolve and adapt to new social paradigms and reflect changes in culture and social norms, and are a good proxy for the evolution of socially sensitive issues. Here, we use an information-theoretic methodology to quantitatively track trends and shifts in the evolution of large corpora of judicial decisions, and thus to detect periods in which disruptive topics arise. When applied to a large database containing the full text of over 100,000 judicial decisions from Spanish courts, we are able to identify an abrupt change in housing-related decisions around 2016. Because our information-theoretic approach pinpoints the specific content that drives change, we are also able to interpret the results in terms of the role played by legislative changes, landmark decisions, and the influence of social movements.

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“…Indeed, federal courts are uniquely situated to do this. Each of the 94 districts courts could, in theory, experiment with its own local procedures and forms (Hammond, 2019) and recent work has demonstrated the potential for such experimental approaches (Pah et al., 2020). However, a necessary prerequisite for any such experiment is the ability to consistently document and measure the work of the courts—which is absent for most litigation events currently.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Promise of AI in an Open Justice System

et al. 2022

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To craft effective public policy, modern governments must gather and analyze data on both the performance of their public functions and the responses by the public. Federal administrative agencies such as the Patent Office and Centers for Disease Control routinely do this, as does the United States Congress. More importantly, they make such data freely accessible. Within the United States government, however, the judicial branch is a conspicuous outlier. In theory, federal court records could be used to evaluate the efficiency and fairness of the justice system. In practice, court records are effectively out of reach because they sit behind a government paywall. This financial barrier, along with an equally important myriad of technical obstacles, have forestalled the development of AI‐driven analysis that could enable a systematic understanding and evaluation of the work of the courts. The Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES OKN) seeks to address this situation by transforming the transparency and accessibility of court records. The SCALES OKN will potentiate the development of new AI solutions that will benefit the judiciary, legal scholars, and the public. In this article, we outline some of key financial, technical, and policy challenges to developing novel AI solutions.

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How to build a more open justice system

Abstract: Court records are unstructured and costly to access—here's how to fix it

Cited by 15 publications

References 2 publications

Privacy and data balkanization: circumventing the barriers

Privacy and data balkanization: circumventing the barriers

Socially disruptive periods and topics from information-theoretical analysis of judicial decisions

The Promise of AI in an Open Justice System

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