Happy New Year... and, also, Happy Public Domain Day!

Happy New Year!

We’ve made another successful rotation around the Sun, which means two things for sure:

1. The Law Library is closed today, January 1, 2019, but don’t fret because we’ll be open tomorrow at 8 a.m.; and

2. New laws go into effect in Texas! While most laws from the last Texas legislative session went into effect in September, some have an effective date of today. Check the Effective Dates for Bills page on the Texas Legislative Reference Library’s website for details.

New Hampshire by Robert Frost is one of many works from 1923 entering the public domain on Jan. 1, 2019.

Happy Public Domain Day!

For many years, copyrighted works regularly entered the public domain each New Year’s Day. However, in 1998, Disney successfully lobbied Congress to extend existing copyrights by 20 years. Today marks the first time in two decades new works will be released for copyright-free use. Visit the Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain website for a listing of books, movies, and music published in 1923 that are now available to all.

Robot Justice

In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, AI Artificial Intelligence, scientists program a robotic boy to understand and express a full range of human emotions, including love. The boy is adopted into a family as a test case where he learns to connect with the couple who become his parents. After a series of unexpected events, the family’s living arrangement becomes unsustainable. The mother begins to fear the boy and abandons him in the woods, consigning him to an uncertain fate. The boys sets out to navigate a complex world where he’s neither fully human nor fully machine.

Fast forward thousands of years to a time when alien life forms have arrived on planet Earth. Here, they discover the body of the robotic boy at the bottom of a frozen river and seek to reverse engineer his design. This quasi-human creation is their only connection to the Earthling inhabitants who preceded them, and they wish to understand his emotions. He was programmed by humans, they reason, so traces of their humanness still exist within his code.

In addition to film’s impressive special effects, its evocative music, and the spectrum of feelings it inspires, this movie also teaches a lesson: software bears the marks of the people who write the code. All of the assumptions, biases, and predetermined social perspectives that we possess get baked in to the algorithms, creating smart machines that lack the objectivity we expect them to exhibit. They inherit our prejudices and act accordingly. Nowhere is this being discussed more widely, it seems, than in the application of AI to the law. The articles listed here, found in popular magazines and journals, describe various ways that AI is being used — and misused — to predict crime, sentence offenders, and determine the likelihood of criminal recidivism. They also explore the limits of AI, the ethics of using AI to mete out justice, and the regulations that some are proposing to counteract the harmful effects of machine bias.

• Artificial Intelligence is Now Used to Predict Crime. But is it Biased? (Smithsonian)

• Can Crime Be Predicted by an Algorithm? from Hello World by Hannah Fry (Penguin)

• Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair (Nature)

• Machine Bias: Risk Assessments in Criminal Sentencing (ProPublica)

• We Need an FDA for Algorithms (Nautilus)

• What Does a Fair Algorithm Look Like? (Wired)

• AI Research is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog (Wired)

• One State’s Bail Reform Exposes the Promise and Pitfalls of Tech-Driven Justice (Wired)

• Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals. That Must Stop Now. (Wired)

• Management AI: Bias, Criminal Recidivism, And the Promise of Machine Learning (Forbes)

• Trust but Verify: A Guide to Algorithms and the Law (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology)

• [VIDEO] The Truth About Algorithms (Aeon)

Legal Podcast Round-Up

According to this infographic from Concordia University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a podcast explosion is upon us. Podcasts are a cultural phenomenon that started gaining serious momentum in 2014 with the first season of Serial, a multi-part work of investigative journalism that achieved cult status among audiophiles and true crime fans alike.

The number and variety of podcasts now available is staggering, and the listening options for podcast fans is only continuing to grow. Legal podcasts are among some of the most popular, in part because they often touch on political topics, as well a criminal and social justice issues, which, in all areas of infotainment, including television docuseries and published investigative journalism, are very well-liked by not only the legal community, but the public in general.

A few of the currently most popular law-related podcasts are listed here:

• RBG: Beyond Notorious - SCOTUS, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

• What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law - Constitutional Law, POTUS

• We the People - Constitutional Law, Federal Government

• More Perfect - Constitutional Law, SCOTUS

• Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) - Constitutional Law, SCOTUS, Federal Government

• The Life of the Law - Investigative Reporting

• Legal Wars - Famous Courtroom Battles

• Criminal Injustice - Criminal Justice

• Constitutional (Washington Post)

• Sworn - Criminal Justice

• Caught - Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice

National Pro Bono Week

This week (Oct. 21-27, 2018) is the 10th Annual National Pro Bono Week! Legal organizations across the country have planned events to celebrate and educate pro bono attorneys in their communities, and the Harris County Law Library is no exception. On Thursday, Oct. 25, at 2 p.m., we’ll offer our first session of Free Legal Tech for the Public, which is designed to help pro bono attorneys and self-represented litigants make sense of all the great online resources available to help individuals representing themselves in legal matters. Everyone is welcome to attend this Hands-on Legal Tech Training from the Law Library’s Legal Tech Institute and Texas attorneys can earn 1.0 hour of CLE credit. Click for details and registration information.

Hats Off to Houston Volunteer Lawyers!

In the tradition of celebrating excellence in pro bono work during National Pro Bono Week, the Law Library would like to give a hat tip to Houston Volunteer Lawyers! HVL attorneys staff the “Library Booth,” which is a legal information booth where self-represented litigants with limited means can speak with a licensed attorney for free. The Library Booth is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., in the lower level of our downtown Houston location. Working in close proximity with HVL attorneys, our law librarians see the positive impact it has on our patrons to have ready access to pro bono attorneys who can answer basic questions. With guidance, self-represented litigants can make better use of the Law Library’s collection and have improved access to justice. Visit www.makejusticehappen.org to see all the ways HVL supports pro bono.

Further Reading

• For more information about National Pro Bono Week, including a nationwide events calendar, visit www.probono.net

• For information about National Pro Bono Week events in Houston, visit the Houston Bar Association’s Pro Bono Week 2018 page.

• For more information about the Law Library’s Hands-on Legal Tech Training sessions, including the Pro Bono Week session of Free Legal Tech for the Public, visit our Legal Tech Institute website and click the Course Calendar.

Public Interest Technology and the law

Photo via: https://www.goodfreephotos.com

Disruptive innovation, content curation  and design thinking are buzzworthy terms that, despite their possible overuse, describe substantive and meaningful concepts with broad application across many disciplines.  Design thinking, the application of design principles to solve problems, is being applied in a variety of fields, including business and industry, healthcare, education, and the law.

IDEO, a global design firm based on Palo Alto, is often credited as the architect of design thinking, and David Kelley, IDEO’s founder, is, not surprisingly, a strong advocate for this inventive problem-solving method. Along with his brother Tom (IDEO’s marketing manager), David Kelley has built a creativity engine that generates some of the most innovative ways of solving problems from the everyday to the exceptional. The brothers also write and speak about creativity and innovation in hopes of inspiring others to use design principles in their personal and professional endeavors.

One of their titles in particular, The Ten Faces of Innovation (written by Tom Kelley), resonates with many who work in law, tech, or at the intersections of these two fields as, increasingly, every lawyer must. Mr. Kelley discusses in some detail the different roles that each person on a team might play and the contributions that each member of a working group might bring to a problem-solving effort. One of those critical roles is that of the cross-pollinator, the person who “draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts to break new ground,” precisely the kind of thinking that’s required in the burgeoning field of public interest technology, a new and rapidly evolving area of practice that allows trained technologists to leverage their knowledge and skills for the benefit of the social good.

By combining tech expertise with fields such as public service, healthcare, criminal justice, education, immigration, child welfare, and the law, cross-pollinators are the perfect kinds of people to work in public interest tech.

To learn more about public interest tech, visit these sites:

• Public interest Tech: A Growing Field You Should Know (Ford Foundation)

• Public Interest Technology: About (New America)

• Serving Up Technology in the Public’s Interest — Hard But Worth It (Mashable)

• Navigating Complexity in Pursuit of Public Interest Technology (Blue Ridge Labs)

• Building our Technology Policy Future (Alan Davidson for Medium.com)

• Why Universities Need ‘Public Interest Technology’ Courses (Wired)

• Navigating the Field of Civic Tech (Derek Poppert for Medium.com)

Also, because it’s voting season, we call your attention to these public interest/civic tech initiatives that are designed to increase turn-out at the polls and ensure a fair and accessible voting experience for all of the electorate:

• Ballot Ready

• Democracy Works

• E.thePeople

• Vote.org

• Voter’s Edge

• We Vote