Research

Academic publications and works in progress

Automated Legal Reasoning (work in progress)

If You Give an LLM a Legal Practice Guide… (with Aaron Tucker) (work in progress)

Restatements (Artificial) of Law (work in progress)

Jobs in the Judiciary (for Robots) (work in progress)

How Algorithms Expose the Law (work in progress)

LLMs as Method Actors: A Model for Prompt Engineering and Architecture (arXiv preprint) (2024)

Reparations of the horse? Algorithmic reparation and overspecialized remedies Big Data & Society, Sept. 2024, at 1 (with Melissa Alvarez-Garcia, Pelle Tracey, Gabriel Grill, Cedric Whitney, and Lauren M. Chambers)

All Models Are Wrong, But Are Risk Assessments Useful? American Society of Criminology Division on Corrections and Sentencing: Handbook on Pretrial Justice (2021) (invited contribution)

Court Culture and Criminal Law Reform, 69 Duke Law Journal Online 84 (2020) (invited contribution) (with Mitali Nagrecha & Sharon Brett)

Studying Up: Reorienting the Study of Algorithmic Fairness Around Issues of Power, ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2020) (with Chelsea Barabas, Karthik Dinakar, & JB Rubinovitz)

Principles of Pretrial Release: Reforming Bail Without Repeating Its Harms, 108 The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 679 (2018) (invited contribution) (with Brook Hopkins & Chiraag Bains)

Note, Bail Reform and Risk Assessment: The Cautionary Tale of Federal Sentencing, 131 Harvard Law Review 1125 (2018)

Case Comment, Utah v. Strieff, 130 Harvard Law Review 337 (2016)

Recent Case, State v. Rasabout, 129 Harvard Law Review 1469 (2016)

Policy publications

Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments Raise Grave Concerns (2019) (with Chelsea Barabas & Karthik Dinakar)

Bail Reform: A Guide for State and Local Policymakers (2019) (with Chiraag Bains & Brook Hopkins)

Columns and commentary

The Feature is the Bug, Inquest (August 2021)

Prop. 25: Should cash bail be replaced with risk assessments? Los Angeles Times Video (October 2020)

Want To Reform The Police? Get Rid Of Qualified Immunity, WBUR Cognoscenti (July 2020)

Chesa Boudin’s New Bail Policy is Nation’s Most Progressive. It Also Reveals Persistence of Tough-on-Crime Norms, The Appeal (January 2020)

The Problems with Risk Assessment Tools, New York Times (July 2019) (with Chelsea Barabas & Karthik Dinakar)

NY Legislators Should Focus on Reducing Pretrial Incarceration, New York Law Journal (March 2019) (with Brook Hopkins)

The Pathways of Pretrial Reform, The American Bar Association Judges’ Journal (August 2018) (with Brook Hopkins)

Selected presentations

“Is Risk of Dangerousness a Probabilistic Inquiry?” The Moral and Practical Dimensions of AI in the Law, School of Law, Loyola University Chicago, 2024

“Restatements (Artificial) of Law,” Syracuse University College of Law, 2024

“Guiding large language models to write legal treatises,” ACM Computer Science and Law Symposium, 2024

“The Restatement (Artificial) of Torts,” Generative AI + Law Workshop at the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023

“How Algorithms Expose the Law,” Information Society Project, Yale Law School, 2021

“Criminal justice by algorithm (Part II): pre-trial detention, sentencing, probation,” Fair Trials, 2020

“Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments,” JusticeLA and Vera Institute of Justice Symposium on a New Vision of Pretrial Justice, 2019

“Pretrial Risk Assessments,” Massachusetts State Bail Commission, 2019

“Law Enforcement and Judicial Solutions,” John Jay Conference on Rural Jail Overcrowding, 2018

Workshop on Public Interest Research in Pretrial Justice, MIT Media Lab, 2018

Bail Reform Symposium, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, 2017