Network Analysis and Machine Learning in Law Conference – University of Oslo Faculty of Law – Call for Papers

Call For Papers:  “The empirical turn in legal scholarship has intensified with the integration of a new quantitative and computational methods. In our second annual workshop on law and social science methods, we call for papers on two increasingly popular approaches: network science and machine learning. We are especially interested in papers that seek to deepen the understanding of these methods or apply them to doctrinal or interdisciplinary questions in areas such as criminology, international law, corporate Law and sustainable development.

The Keynote Speaker for the workshop is Dan Katz, Illinois Tech – Chicago Kent College of Law, who has been a pioneer in the use of both methods in understanding and predicting the behavior of the US Supreme Court and advancing the field of legal technology”

Abstracts of approximately 200 words should be submitted to Martin Nøkleberg and Hanna Ahlström by  22 August 2018.

Acceptance of papers will be notified by 1 September 2018.
Papers should be submitted by 24 September 2018.
Workshop 10-11 October 2018 at the University of Olso 

Legal Analytics – Introduction to the Course – Professors Daniel Martin Katz + Michael J Bommarito

Here is an introductory slide deck from “Legal Analytics” which is a course that Mike Bommarito and I are teaching this semester. Relevant legal applications include predictive coding in e-discovery (i.e. classification), early case assessment and overall case prediction, pricing and staff forecasting, prediction of judicial behavior, etc.

As I have written in my recent article in Emory Law Journal – we are moving into an era of data driven law practice. This course is a direct response to demands from relevant industry stakeholders. For a large number of prediction tasks … humans + machines > humans or machines working alone.

We believe this is the first ever Machine Learning Course offered to law students and it our goal to help develop the first wave of human capital trained to thrive as this this new data driven era takes hold.  Richard Susskind likes to highlight this famous quote from Wayne Gretzky … “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

R Boot Camp – Part 2 in Quantitative Methods for Lawyers (Professor Daniel Martin Katz)

Today was Day 2 of our R Boot Camp in Quantitative Methods for Lawyers.

In total, there will be three set of slides in this multi-day bootcamp designed to introduce students to the logic of R, the basic roadblocks such as loading data and cleaning data, loading various R packages, running basic commands, shifting out of default command settings, plotting data, conducting statistical tests, etc. Later in the course we will use R for regression analysis, etc.

For anyone who might be interested, the Full Course Page including all slidedecks is located here. For help on the installation of R and the RStudio IDE please check out my Loading R/RStudio Bonus Module.