Oct 25, 17:15: Inaugural Lecture (Elliott Ash)

Recent advances in data science have caused many people to rethink the roles of humans and computers in the study, design, and practice of law. This lecture discusses the expanding digitization of legal corpora, and the tools from natural language processing and machine learning that are making quantitative analysis of these corpora possible.

These data and corpora allow us to ask a new set of questions in law and political economy. Toward which social groups are judges biased in their decisions? How much do the provisions in the tax code contribute to inequality? How do labor contracts allocate control rights between managers and workers? How does media messaging contribute to polarization in policy debates?

The lecture describes ongoing research on all of these fronts.