LAW SCHOOL NEWS
In the Media… “If I were running for office, the chatbot could say something racist as if it were me and dash my prospects for election.”—University Distinguished Professor Emerita Lori Andrews, discussing dangers of social mediaharvested data to create personal autonomous “chatbots” (Gizmodo)
Nancy S. Kim Named Inaugural Michael Paul Galvin Chair
Law Lab Director Honored as Academic Data Leader, Co-Edits New Book The director of the Law Lab at Chicago-Kent College of Law earned recognition as a top leader in the field of data and analytics from a national publication dedicated to the topic, and a book on the integration of law and technology that he co-edited was released.
Starting in fall 2021, Nancy S. Kim will be the first Michael Paul Galvin Chair in Entrepreneurship and Applied Legal Technology, in which she will reside and teach at Chicago-Kent College of Law while engaging in interdisciplinary research and facilitating law student involvement at the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at Illinois Institute of Technology. Kim is the ProFlowers Distinguished Professor of Internet Studies at San Diego’s California Western School of Law, where she has taught for the past 17 years. Prior to that, she worked in the private sector in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kim’s research centers on the way technology and law interact. From the explosion of online digital contracts—where users are prompted to quickly click “Yes” to large volumes of small print—to the notion of how such clicks equate to consent and the overall legality of online consent itself, Kim has explored how the evolving technological world is changing our perceptions and expectations, and even the way we live.
The following month, Legal Informatics was published by Cambridge University Press. An exploration of how emerging technologies affect the practice of and access to the law, the book was edited by Katz along with Ron Dolin, a senior research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, and Michael J. Bommarito, the Law Lab’s research director.
Law School Teams Up with Local Community Organization to Educate South Side Youth
From virtual court hearings and online dispute resolution to utilizing data analytics for document review, the book explores how attorneys and their clients can take advantage of technology to access and improve legal services.
In fall 2020 Chicago-Kent College of Law worked with community-based nonprofit Future Ties to hold six educational sessions with high school students living in the Parkway Gardens Apartments on Chicago’s South Side. Future Ties was founded by Chicago Police Officer Jennifer Maddox, who worked as a security guard at Parkway during her off hours. Her organization offers academic, life skills, and mentorship programming for Parkway’s children and their parents. The first session, conducted in October 2020 over Zoom, was a discussion on how to interpret a law governing vehicles in a park. Students debated potential ways to rewrite the law as they became more familiar with the legal language inherent to ordinances. The sessions were part of the Discover Law program coordinated by Chicago-Kent’s Marsha Ross-Jackson, senior lecturer and assistant dean, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Michelle Vodenik, senior director and public interest/diversity adviser in the Career Services Office. 6
CHICAGO-KENT MAGAZINE
In January, Professor Daniel Martin Katz made Chief Data Officer Magazine’s 2021 list of Leading Academic Data Leaders, which honors 100 academics from institutions around the globe.
The Law Lab is a Chicago-Kent teaching and research center focused on the integration of law and technology.
In the Media… “The bottom line is if you can’t get jurors because they won’t come in or they can’t sit safely, or you can’t get witnesses who won’t come in or can’t testify safely, you have to do something.” —Richard Kling, Chicago-Kent clinical law professor, on the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision to allow certain types of remote hearings (Quad-City Times)
