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Embedded Research Helps Everyone: Fairness in Artificial Intelligence

LII has always strived to discover new and better ways to make the law more findable and understandable for the public, which has given us a relentlessly practical orientation toward research. Most of the time, we have our hands full keeping up with the academic literature and supervising student research projects, but from time to time we find an opportunity to become involved in more formal research projects in one capacity or another. And very occasionally a project comes along that helps us consolidate what we have learned and enhance everything we offer the public.  

Last spring, LII, along with the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) and Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab became advisors to a new Law-and-Artificial-Intelligence research project entitled “FAI: Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice.” Law-and-AI luminaries Professors Kevin Ashley and Diane Litman at the University of Pittsburgh lead the project, which aims to bring the fruits of law and AI research to the public. Their project proposal struck a chord with us, particularly when they noted that “Although many AI tools are already available to law firms and legal departments, these tools do not typically reach members of the public and legal service practitioners except through expensive commercial paywalls.” 

We were very fortunate this semester to be able to arrange for LII’s language and data science specialist, Dr. Sylvia Kwakye, to embed with the research team. This arrangement has given her a chance to think through the research challenges associated with very particular natural language interpretation tasks while exploring in detail the various ways in which the research data (notably the rules from Ph.D. student Huihui Xu’s research and caselaw sentences from CMU postdoc Jaromir Savelka’s research) could be used to enhance primary law resources on the LII website. We are particularly excited about the potential boon to public understanding afforded by the ability to connect definitions from state and federal regulations to explanations from the jurisprudence in the Caselaw Access Project corpus (see “Spotlight on Free“). We’ve also been heartened to see the ways in which the results of our most recent editorial enhancements to the Wex definitions (see “Anatomy of a Traffic Spike: Hard Work Pays Off“), along with the output of M.Eng. research work extracting definitions from U.S. Code, CFR, and now state regulations, might be of use.

We’re grateful for the chance to learn from the Law-and-AI research community and excited to bring our small role in this project full circle.

Knowledge is Power: Open Access, Equity, and Cornell’s Land Grant Mission

Join us for a panel talk hosted by LII as part of International Open Access week!

In the context of a university such as Cornell, open access is often viewed through the lens of academic scholarship. But it can be, and is, so much more. Many Cornell programs further Cornell’s land grant mission by providing open access resources to the general public. A panel of representatives from some of these programs will discuss their work, its impacts, the importance of open access to their mission, and how they strive to make their respective fields more accessible and equitable through their work with open access projects.
Moderator: Craig Newton, Co-Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law
Panelists:

  • Sara Frug, Co-Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law
  • Jim DelRosso, Assistant Director, Catherwood Library, ILR School
  • Christopher Wood, Managing Director, Center for Avian Population Studies and Director, eBird

Dial-In Information

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 11:30am to 12:30pm

Click below to join the panel:

https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96580546684?pwd=T3FVdTV2ODNJVjFDZG83R3A2UmJDdz09

Tune in for for a full week of panels, presentations and resources on building structural equity to knowledge with Open Access across Cornell University and beyond:

https://guides.library.cornell.edu/OAWeek

Spotlight on Free: Caselaw Access Project

Back in 2015, Harvard Law School announced the launch of the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), a project of its Library Innovation Lab. This is a collection of almost seven million cases covering about 360 years of American judicial opinions. Though we know that more than one librarian felt a little queasy at the sight of venerable old case reporters having their spines severed and bindings undone so that their pages could be fed through high-speed scanners, this effort to digitize and democratize all of American case law was very much a welcome announcement.

You can find the results at case.law

Though it’s easy enough to search the CAP database by keyword or citation, for example, the folks at the Library Innovation Lab and throughout the librarian community have other plans in mind for the 36.3 million or so pages in the collection. Their blog tracks and explains feature development in the database. For a lawyer who thinks very old legal opinions are good for nothing but ending sentences that begin with “It is well-settled that…,” each and every post in that blog will be an education. Similarly, a recent article in the online magazine of the American Association of Law Librarians describes projects in data mining, linguistics, link rot, citation analysis, natural language processing, named entity recognition, and topic modeling that are all being conducted using the CAP database.   

CAP is not, and does not pretend to be, a one-stop shop for legal research. It appears, for example, that not everything that courts have done after the project went online has made its way into CAP. For instance, our current favorite Supreme Court Case, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org is in CAP with a note in the sidebar that the “case source” is the commercial legal research service Fastcase. However, some recently-published federal appellate decisions that cite the case, such as Freeman v. Wainwright  and Craft Smith, LLC v. EC Design, LLC do not (yet) seem to be.  

In the end, CAP is a potential (and potentially powerful) tool to add to the free online legal research sources you should know about. While you may well find that it doesn’t answer all of your prayers for a free case law search engine, you should be aware that researchers in several fields are using its large data set and API to do work that is likely to make its way into the tools that the next generation of lawyers will use.  

Student Spotlight: Bulletin Previews Back in Full Swing

October, as it always does, brought the start of a new term at the U.S. Supreme Court.  And, as we always do, the LII welcomed a new team of students to our Supreme Court Bulletin Previews staff. Leading the crew this year are Rachel Skene and Stewart Rickert.  

Rachel is the Editor-in-Chief. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Puget Sound in 2017 with bachelor’s degrees in both International Relations and Affairs and also French Literature. Rachel taught in France and Oregon before enrolling at Cornell Law School.  

Stewart is the Executive Editor. He graduated magna cum laude from Wake Forest University in 2016 with a degree in Economics and Political Science.  Stewart worked as an investment banking analyst before coming to Cornell Law School.  

All 36 students who make up the Bulletin Previews staff (12 third-year and 24 second-year students) are eager to bring you comprehensive and viewpoint-neutral analysis of each case before it’s argued. If you don’t already subscribe to this free service, you can sign up here:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/subscribe

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, we wanted to feature our work on an interesting case the Court heard earlier this month. In United States v. Zubaydah, the Court will decide how much deference a trial court should give the federal government when the latter seeks to invoke the state secrets privilege when withholding evidence from discovery in civil litigation. You can find our Preview here:  https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/20-827.

Anatomy of Traffic Spike: Hard Work Pays Off

Usually, we use this space to feature a conspicuous bump in traffic to some part of our website and map it to a recent news event.  This time, however, we’re going to do something a little bit different.  In an article back in April, we told the story of how we’d used the extra student labor made available to us during the Summer of 2020 (as their other summer jobs shrunk or vanished entirely) to re-invigorate more than 1,000 definitions in our Wex collection.  

In that same article, we introduced Nichole McCarthy, LII’s new Original Content Collections Manager.  She spent the Summer of 2021 continuing the Wex Definitions Project, and her student crew improved upon the output from the summer prior.  In total we have renovated around 2,500 Wex definitions, making each one longer and more comprehensive while linking it to more related content on our website such as statutes, US Supreme Court decisions, and other Wex articles.  We also added dozens of new definitions.

All of that work makes those pages better in the eyes of search engines, resulting in our Wex pages being more findable to the general public. And the public has, indeed, found Wex. This graph shows Wex pageviews up 20% from July through September of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020.  

Google Analytics graphic showing visitors increase over a period of time

Considering all that was in the headlines during this time last year–the election, the pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement all come instantly to mind–it’s amazing that Wex traffic is up dramatically this year.  All signs point to the output of our Wex Definitions Project as the reason why.  

Of course, traffic in-and-of itself is not our goal. The purpose of Wex is to provide useful, viewpoint neutral explanations of legal terms and concepts to anyone who needs them. We like to think that some segment of that increased viewership was spared a trip to other websites offering answers that are at the very least aligned with a political or social agenda and the very worst just flat wrong.    

We still have more than 5,000 other definitions in Wex, all of which will be re-visited in the coming years, and most of which will be revised in the process. Meanwhile, we continue to explore better organizations and linkages within Wex to provide even deeper context for our readers. We’ll keep you posted along the way.