CS50 for Lawyers

https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/cs50-lawyers?delta=0

by jgrimm • 6 years ago

96 28 6 years ago

online-learning.harvard.edu

borepop• 6 years ago

This looks great, thank you.

jgrimm• 6 years ago

No problem, my friend who studies law has just started it and is finding it super interesting.

btown• 6 years ago

It's incredible that this material is being provided for free, and I hope that law firms far and wide encourage their associates and partners alike to update their knowledge with this. Understanding which parties and systems touch, transform, and transmit data is central to practically every legal matter in modern times, and standard intro-to-CS coursework is neither sufficient nor fully necessary for legal experts to know the right questions to ask domain experts. The clarity this brings will be a huge benefit to society.

rmrfstar• 6 years ago

I hope that law firms far and wide encourage their associates and partners alike to update their knowledge with this

"But most of all, the legal profession has failed. Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uphold the law, not who understand and exploit it. On average, lawyers have become so deeply corrupt that it is imperative for major changes in the profession to take place, far beyond the meek proposals already on the table. To start, the term “legal ethics,” upon which codes of conduct and licensure are nominally based, has become an oxymoron. Mossack Fonseca did not work in a vacuum—despite repeated fines and documented regulatory violations, it found allies and clients at major law firms in virtually every nation. If the industry’s shattered economics were not already evidence enough, there is now no denying that lawyers can no longer be permitted to regulate one another. It simply doesn’t work. Those able to pay the most can always find a lawyer to serve their ends, whether that lawyer is at Mossack Fonseca or another firm of which we remain unaware. What about the rest of society?

The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system—our system—the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese. The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world should shock us all awake. But when it takes a whistleblower to sound the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern. It signals that democracy’s checks and balances have all failed, that the breakdown is systemic, and that severe instability could be just around the corner. So now is the time for real action, and that starts with asking questions." [1]

[1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160506-j...

relaunched• 6 years ago

It's unclear how this course applies or is customized specifically for lawyers. There would be a much clearer value proposition for lawyers if it was summarized in a way like - learn how to build APIs - examining the key claims and decisions from the Oracle v. Google Java API case. As advertised, it seems like a regular CS overview course. They're definitely on to something, it seems like a class to help attorneys better understand key concepts of programming to be better attorneys, rather than a transition from the law to programming career. If that's the case, they need to do a better job advertising how each bullet point will help them become better attorneys.

It also might have more credibility if they had an instructor who was an attorney.

leovander2• 6 years ago

It's unclear how this course applies or is customized specifically for lawyers

My wife (lawyer) did the first three classes and the first two assignments. I watched along and was waiting for the same thing. She had some fun doing binary and playing around in scratch, and quickly lost interest as we didn't see where the legal part came in. We assumed it was the same course all the other CS50 variants were following and maybe there would be a legal bit at the end.

eeegnu• 6 years ago

If there's anything in that course that would be directly valuable for lawyers, I think it would be version control systems (assuming they cover it.) I don't know how much legal literature exists in this form today, but I imagine all laws and court decisions will migrate to such systems for the ease of access.

abdullahkhalids2• 6 years ago

My electrical engineering students, too, get bored when my differential equations course does not talk about circuits in any significant way.

Why do people not realize that skills and knowledge gained in one course will be used in specialized ways in another course? And they don't know enough just yet, to realize that specific topics chosen in the first course have been chosen with the intent of helping them do well in the second course?

bvod2• 6 years ago

This is not only much needed, but also will help shape how our legal system can adapt to new technologies.

I had the privilege of sitting in on an Election Law class last year at YLS. The topic was gerrymandering, with a discussion of the legal arguments presented in Vieth v. Jubelirer.

For non-lawyers, the plaintiffs arguments for what should constitute illegal gerrymandering is technically complex, using statistic concepts, graphs (computer science), and even np-completeness. In essence, the argument was to use computers to draw all possible congressional districts, score them on the basis of discarded votes, and if the scoring of the drawn districts is greater than two standard deviations from the mean district, determine it is unfairly drawn. I found particularly striking an audio recording the professor shared of a lawyer struggling to answer John Robert's questions on technical topics. The professor used this as an example to be prepared to answer questions that you may not have a background in, even if the expert witnesses had already explained the concepts. Unfortunately, the court rejected the proposed determination of unfair gerrymandering in a 5-4 decision, with the dissent stating that the presented way to determine unfair gerrymandering was clever, correct, and should be revisited.

As we continue to push the frontiers of what we can do with computers, we need informed lawyers who can clearly present deep technical topics, and we need judges who are capable of understanding them.

petr_tik• 6 years ago

I tried to find the curriculum structure for this course to check if it involves any of the topics you brought up, but could not do it.

If this course doesn't include relevant legal topics, do you know any other "programming for lawyers" course that you would recommend?

extra88• 6 years ago

Here is the OpenCourseWare site for the material [0]. It includes all the lecture videos, slides, and assignments plus notes, subtitles, and transcripts for each.

Based on the lecture titles, statistical concepts may be obliquely touched on but probably not graphs or np-completeness.

[0] https://cs50.harvard.edu/law/2019/

rarefied_tomato2• 6 years ago

I can get behind statistical and CS concepts being used to detect gerrymandered districts. There's a whole related field of anomaly detection.

My quackery sense tingles when I hear NP-completeness was mentioned in the argument. Do you have more info on the claimed relevance to gerrymandering?

bvod2• 6 years ago

Of course, you can find the full explanation in the amicus brief: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legal-work...

It is NP complete in determining to an absolute degree that a redistricting plan is excessively unfair, as the number of possibly districts grows exponentially. Demonstrating to a quantitative degree is more clear (eg stop drawing more maps after a few billion).

I highly recommend anyone interested read at least the summary of the above brief, but relevant details from page 4 are reproduced:

"With modern computer technology, it is now straightforward to (i) generate a large collection of redistricting plans that are representative of all possible plans that meet the State’s declared goals (e.g., compactness and contiguity); (ii) calculate the partisan outcome that would occur under each such plan, based upon actual precinct-level votes in one or more recent elections; (iii) display the distribution of the outcomes across these plans; and (iv) situate the State’s chosen plan along that continuum to reveal the degree to which that plan is an outlier. One can analyze outcomes for a statewide plan as a whole, or for an individual district within a plan. In this way, it is now straightforward to measure the quantitative degree to which a partisan gerrymander is excessive."

kemitchell• 6 years ago

I'd argue all of that diving into technical details didn't end up mattering that much, either in Vieth itself or especially after Rucho v. Common Cause.

rajacombinator• 6 years ago

Oh come on. That’s a bunch of buffoonery presented by an academic who wants to sound much smarter than they are, and has zero application to reality. Our legal system is about dividing up the pie amongst those who can pay for it.

abdullahkhalids2• 6 years ago

Interesting. My country Pakistan, took a different approach in the last elections. An algorithm [1] was agreed upon, on how to draw constituency boundaries for each district. Further, there can ordinarily only be 10% variation between constituencies in a single district. The entire delimitations exercise was done in open, and there were multiple review steps.

I imagine the algorithm could be further improved, but it at least ensured some amount of certainty and transparency.

------ [1] As far as possible, the delimitation of constituencies of an Assembly shall start from the Northern end of the district1[**] and then proceed clock-wise in zigzag manner keeping in view that population among the constituencies of an Assembly shall remain as close as may be practicable to the quota: https://www.ecp.gov.pk/documents/laws2017/1-3-2020/The%20Ele...

gravypod2• 6 years ago

I wish that more schools offered "X for Y" classes to foster basic literacy in relevant areas of study. I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers" or "Architecture for Game Designers".

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers"

Don't all game programming courses already include extensive maths classes?

gravypod2• 6 years ago

Curriculums? In my experience yes. Unfortunately connecting those classes to the things you're going to be doing is usually an exercise left to the reader.

It's usually "here's some linear algebra and calc" but not "this thing you're doing here comes from this model and here's how we got here"

ialsohavenoname• 6 years ago

It's certainly a deeply interesting interface between law and CS. Does anybody know how it can be explored further (in Europe if this makes a difference)? Recently graduated law school and I've been passionate for CS for quite a number of years and I'd love to combine the two?

dictumexmachina• 6 years ago

Look into smart contracts (Solidity), legaltech

Naac• 6 years ago

This looks neat! Unfortunately it doesn't look like there is "Law 101 for Software Developers", which I think would be an interesting course.

aronpye• 6 years ago

I think a general law course for computer scientists and software engineers would also be useful.

WildGreenLeave• 6 years ago

Last year I read a book about IT laws in The Netherlands and ever since I read it I was able to apply that knowledge multiple times. Not necessarily the knowledge from the book itself, but also knowing when you don't know something.

This wasn't a course or anything, it was the interpretation of the law by an IT lawyer from NL so it took me just a few hours to read in total.

Orochikaku• 6 years ago

Would you happen to remember the title of the book?

CS50 for Lawyers

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