[HN Gopher] CS50 for Lawyers
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CS50 for Lawyers
Author : jgrimm
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-01-10 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (online-learning.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (online-learning.harvard.edu)
| aronpye wrote:
| I think a general law course for computer scientists and software
| engineers would also be useful.
| WildGreenLeave wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Would you happen to remember the title of the book?
| ialsohavenoname wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Look into smart contracts (Solidity), legaltech
| relaunched wrote:
| 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.
| leovander wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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.
| leovander wrote:
| Again we stopped taking the course because it just didn't
| seem relevant enough for her line of work, but another
| lawyer friend of ours could definitely use a legal oriented
| "what is version control/source
| code/package/importing/forking/branching" course.
| borepop wrote:
| This looks great, thank you.
| jgrimm wrote:
| No problem, my friend who studies law has just started it and
| is finding it super interesting.
| gravypod wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers"
|
| Don't all game programming courses already include extensive
| maths classes?
| gravypod wrote:
| 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"
| btown wrote:
| 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.
| Naac wrote:
| This looks neat! Unfortunately it doesn't look like there is "Law
| 101 for Software Developers", which I think would be an
| interesting course.
| bvod wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| rajacombinator wrote:
| 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.
| kemitchell wrote:
| 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.
| rarefied_tomato wrote:
| 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?
| bvod wrote:
| 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."
| rarefied_tomato wrote:
| I'll check it out. Thanks!
|
| Edit: I didn't find anything in that particular resource. A
| similar work mentioning complexity is here:
| https://desh2608.github.io/static/report/ohio.pdf
|
| Roughly, it boils down to a constrained search for the best
| mapping of precincts into districts, which is NP-hard.
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(page generated 2021-01-10 23:02 UTC)