JURIST Digital Scholars Program

Jessie (Ziyu) Lin is an incoming JD student at Harvard Law School. She graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s degree in law and economics.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Jessie will study the use of location data tracking in the control and prevention of COVID-19. Jessie will examine various location tracking approaches adopted by different countries, including centralized approaches adopted by Asian countries, and decentralized and user-centric approaches favored by European countries and the United States. Her research will analyze the cycle of collection, storage, management and destruction of the location data. Her project also intends to understand the legal barrier to the use of location data tracking technologies and will analyze the privacy concerns aroused by the application of such technologies and their implications under privacy laws (especially GDPR), criminal laws, and constitutional laws.

Madhur Bhatt, Lithin Mathew Thomas and Viraj Aditya have teamed up. Their research as JURIST Digital Scholars will seek to understand and formulate a comprehensive legal and policy framework outlook relating to AI-enabled medical devices. The primary objective of their research is to determine a roadmap that balances privacy challenges with economic growth, particularly in the context of India. For this, they shall be undertaking a comparative study to determine best practices from around the world with an aim to better understand the global perspective. The countries chosen for this exercise include the USA, China, and South Korea. These countries, while being leaders in AI development, possess features that are similar to India or include aspects that India seeks to emulate (E.g., China’s data localisation). To further understand the legal-policy framework and provide tools to objectively assess its viability, they shall be creating a questionnaire consisting of a set of parameters that would serve as a benchmark for evaluating present and future legislation in this field. This, they hope, shall assist in judging the impact of potential policy framework changes. The last leg of their research will focus on studying the aptitude of AI-enabled medical devices to bridge the urban-rural divide in access to healthcare.

Madhur Bhatt is a third-year student pursuing a BA, LLB (Honours) at Hidayatullah National Law University, majoring in Political Science.

Madhur is interested in public policy, health law, insolvency and bankruptcy laws. He has previously worked at NITI Aayog, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Centre for Civil Society, on topics related to sustainability, anti-doping and education. He also works as a Senior Editor in his university’s journal. He is passionate about the intersection of law and policy to solve long-standing problems of access to health, sustainability and education. His non-academic interests include art, philosophy and quizzing.

Lithin Mathew Thomas is a third-year student pursuing a BA, LLB (Honours) at Hidayatullah National Law University, majoring in Political Science.

Lithin is the Deputy Team Leader for Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to Legal Education (IDIA, Chhattisgarh Chapter), a non-profit dedicated to empowering marginalized and underprivileged students in the field of legal education. He takes a keen interest in the intersection of law and technology, financial crimes and foreign policy. He is also a fledgling graphic designer and has worked with multiple organizations in the said capacity. In his free time, he engages in a futile battle with the ever-growing and scattered to-be-read lists in his possession.

Viraj Aditya is a third-year student pursuing a BA, LLB (Honours) at Hidayatullah National Law University, majoring in Political Science.

Viraj has worked with the Centre for Civil Society, Centre for Policy Research, and the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy on projects related to education laws, land laws, and sports laws. He is currently working as a Researcher at the Institute for Internet and the Just Society, Berlin in the Digital Constitutionalism cycle. Recently, he has started exploring the field of legal data analytics and hopes to resolve some complex legal challenges plaguing the justice system by extracting and analysing some interesting datasets. Apart from his interests in law, history, astronomy, technology, and psychology deeply excite him. He is an avid runner and an ardent bicyclist. In his free time, he reads legal history and practices his ukulele.

Peter Busscher is a rising junior at the University of Pittsburgh where he is pursuing a BPhil in History and International & Area Studies.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Peter will investigate whether the United States and Russia will be able to set up a regime of arms control for emerging weapons technologies. I will be evaluating legal texts, speeches, and articles using computational linguistics and creating infographic material for a two-part series on this topic, to be published on Jurist. I will employ a mixture of Russian and English texts in my research, to obtain valuable linguistic data on a political topic. Going forward, we could either be headed towards an international arms regime which is stable and based on rules, or one which is thoroughly chaotic. My research will evaluate the sorts of formal or informal understandings which could mitigate the deterioration of strategic stability between the two most advanced military powers and exporters.

Xinming Liu, Gloria Ren and Brian Liu have teamed up. Their research as JURIST Digital Scholars will focus on consumer privacy. Regulations governing the collection of personally identifiable information (PII) are ineffective towards protecting consumer privacy. As data-gathering technologies become more pervasive in everyday life, non-personal data can be easily leveraged to identify consumers. They aim to develop a regulatory framework based on differential privacy. This framework will better protect user privacy while preserving the performance of tools that depend on user data.

Xinming (Lily) Liu is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Operations Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to embarking on her PhD, she completed her bachelor of science in Operations Research and Information Engineering & Computer Science at Cornell University in 2020.

Gloria Ren is currently working as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman in New York, New York. She graduated from Cornell University’s Operations Research & Engineering School with a bachelor of science in May 2020. She plans to apply for law school in the fall, combining her background in engineering and technology with law.

Brian Liu works as a data and applied scientist at Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington.He graduated from Cornell University with a BS in Operations Research in 2020.

Catherine Chang recently graduated from Yale University, where she studied Economics and Statistics & Data Science.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Catherine’s goal is to broaden public understanding of legal change, expand access to primary sources and encourage civic engagement. To this end, she will analyze JURIST’s most-read and least read articles, writing functions that extract information related to article length, topic, author, and national focus and merging that dataset with Google Analytics. Through her research, she hopes to better understand the attributes that make certain articles more widely read than others and that her findings promote publishing practices that make legal issues and developments more accessible to the public.

Michael Chau is a rising senior at Yale, majoring in Statistics and Economics.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Michael will use machine learning (word embeddings and clustering) to generate news timelines from a search term. This model will take a broad subject (Ex. FCC) and break it down into several subcategories (Ex. Robocalls, Net Neutrality, etc.) to generate timelines using JURIST articles about these subcategories. Readers will then be able to interact with and adjust these timelines to suit their needs. Anyone who wishes to explore more can simply click on an event in the timeline and be taken directly to the JURIST article. The goal of this project is to facilitate the reader’s understanding of various news and legal topics through a visual and clean representation. Too often, anyone who wants to understand the development of a particular topic has to go through multiple news articles to connect the dots. This project aims to streamline this process for readers.

Alex Chen is a rising sophomore at Yale, double majoring in Computer Science and Ethics, Politics & Economics.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Alex will focus his research on how agent-based models (ABMs) can be used in policing reform efforts.

Alex first discovered ABMs, a class of computational models used to simulate the actions of autonomous agents, in high school, when he created a community-building simulator. It was very ugly, but he thought it was super cool. Excited by their potential to illuminate complex social dynamics, Alex was nevertheless wary. He noticed that many police organizations used ABMs to fight crime, but that few to none acknowledged the risk they posed of perpetuating oppression and inequality, embodying a callousness that he is, frankly, really tired of.

Alex realized that ABMs could help to explain why some police reforms work and others do not, particularly because ABMs excel at identifying underlying micro-processes within systems. So he has decided to create an ABM framework for modeling police reform efforts! He hopes to engage in meticulous scientific analysis without losing sight of the deep human impact of such an important issue.

Everest Fang graduated this May from Yale University with a BA in Economics and Mathematics. He was admitted to Harvard Law School through its Junior Deferral Program and plans to begin his studies in the fall of 2022. In August, Everest will begin working at Deloitte’s Government/Public Services Consulting Office in Washington. DC.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Everest will study the recent evolution of antitrust issues in the US, and their consequences in the COVID age. He seeks to describe the consequences of consolidation in various industries, particularly in the context of today’s crisis. He also intends to understand how public attention to antitrust issues has developed in recent years by analyzing data on JURIST readership. Everest hopes to spark more interest in competition law by articulating how it has shaped the society we live in today, and how individuals can make an impact in this arena.

Arka Gupta is a recent graduate of Yale University and an incoming student at Harvard Law School.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Arka hopes to leverage technology to make public policy more accessible. His research will analyze sentiment towards medical marijuana legislation over time in the context of the opioid epidemic. With overdose deaths steadily progressing since the early 2000s, Arka will investigate to what extent a public health crisis influences sentiments towards public policy, especially given marijuana’s history of criminalization. In particular, he seeks to examine whether growing support for medical marijuana can be attributed to an increased focus on criminal justice reform, its use as a tool in palliative care, or other factors. Using natural language processing, Arka hopes to extract keywords and trends in medical marijuana legislation and package this information into a format accessible to all.

Connor Haaland graduated from South Dakota State University in 2019, earning degrees in Spanish and Global Studies with minors in Economics and French. Most recently, Connor has been a research assistant at The Mercatus Center, where his primary research was on the intersection of law and emerging technology, publishing numerous articles and working papers on the subject. Connor will attend Harvard Law School this fall.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Connor will research data governance paradigms, focusing specifically on China, the US, and Europe. These three entities have unique data governance structures and illustrate well the various paths down which countries may proceed. Moreover, for countries like the US that lack a clear governance strategy, analyzing existing regimes can inform future legislation and policy goals. Creating successful data governance structures is of paramount importance today because there is an intimate link between data and AI, which is where the most exciting technological breakthroughs are happening. For instance, driverless vehicles alone could reduce vehicular accidents so much so that it might well be the greatest public health breakthrough in our lifetimes. Likewise, AI could be used to complement healthcare workers and create superior patient outcomes. The realization of these groundbreaking applications, however, relies on data aggregation. The link between AI and data and the benefits it may allow must be understood. But, these benefits must be tempered by the understanding that data is sensitive and ought to be governed with the utmost care. Striking a balance between the aggregation of data, using it to power groundbreaking technologies, and the very real privacy concerns that accompany that aggregation is what Connor’s research will flesh out.

Alissa Ji is a recent graduate from Yale University, where she received a BA in Statistics & Data Science and Economics.

Hailing from the suburbs of Atlanta, she is interested in technology policy, data journalism, and affordable housing. Alissa has interned for the National Center for Health Statistics, a federal statistical agency, and Bain & Company, a management consulting firm. She has also conducted independent research on federal housing programs for AAPI Data, an organization that publishes policy research and demographic data on AAPI communities.

Samantha Thorne graduated from the University of Utah with an honors BA in International Studies and a BS in Economics. A Truman Scholar, she will begin studies at Harvard Law School this fall.

Samantha is interested in the ethical and legal ramifications of AI and is passionate about the role of government and public policy in maximizing its benefits while mitigating its long-term risks. In her previous role as a correspondent, Samantha authored the inaugural US-China AI Tech Summit report and covered technology policy in Washington. DC, She worked for Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company and conducted AI policy research while in Melbourne to start an interdisciplinary AI task force in the city.

Alissa and Samantha have teamed up. Their research as JURIST Digital Scholars will seek to understand the public’s perception of the US Supreme Court. The news media play a critical role in shaping the public’s knowledge of the court, but studies demonstrate that press coverage is oftentimes limited in scope and quality. Because JURIST serves as a unique non-mass media source of legal news, Samantha and Alissa hope to use the past two decades of its Supreme Court coverage to gauge trends in reporting and reader interest in and engagement with articles related to the court. Using natural language processing methods, they will investigate changes in Supreme Court coverage in the following areas: case salience, coverage language in reference to partisanship and ‘game-frame,’ and reader engagement. The final product will be a digital visual essay that relies on a combination of data visualizations and written analysis to inform legal scholars, professionals, and members of the public of their findings.

Philos Kim is a rising sophomore at Yale, studying Mathematics.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Philos will examine the extent of algorithmic bias in deep learning models by using JURIST articles as testing data. In particular, he will design sentiment classification networks with both convolutional and recurrent architectures in PyTorch, using Captum to interpret and visualize their parameters and results. He also plans to use statistical methods to draw conclusions about the significance of his results, as well as to compare the performance and bias of complex deep learning models to simpler statistical ones. Ultimately, he wants to draw conclusions about the extent of demographic and ideological bias in cutting-edge artificial intelligence models, and how that manifests when legal news and commentary articles are the test data. Although his project is on the technical side, Philos wants to make the tools he creates and the results of his research accessible to people with primarily qualitative backgrounds. To that end, he will delve into the political and philosophical implications of his research as much as its mathematical implications. And, if time permits, he will also try to make a user-friendly library in Python with the tools he has made.

Brent Mobbs graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He will begin studies at Harvard Law School this fall.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Brent will research how solar technology can be further incentivized in the US, for individuals, businesses, and utility companies. He plans to use data from the Energy Information Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, among other sources, to investigate the effects of implementing Renewable Portfolio Standards on emissions and economies of different states. Using this data, I hope to identify and advocate for the best method of improving these Renewable Portfolio Standards.

Agnes Poplawski is a fourth-year student studying Political Science and Economics at Stony Brook University.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Agnes will focus her research on the evolution of sex and sexual orientation as a protected class in the US, particularly examining the behavior of consumers and producers of the news. She will analyze JURIST’s archive and Google Analytics data, as well as outside sources, to better understand the public’s interest in and media representation of LGBTQ+ rights at moments leading up to milestone achievements in the struggle for greater recognition of LGBTQ+ rights in the courts and legislation.

Agasha Ratam is a rising senior at Yale, primarily studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Agasha aims to study how readability and other related factors affect the accessibility of legal articles. Popular websites often emphasize the readability of articles as a means to reach a wider audience. Especially for legal news articles where field-specific terminologies are ubiquitous, improving readability may be important to ensure that an article is accessible to the general public.

The goal of this project is to extract insights from JURIST’s historical articles and Google Analytics data and to inform legal-news writers of possible writing strategies they can implement in their articles to reach a broader audience. The first step of this project is establishing a scale that captures how accessible a legal news or commentary article is to the general public. This scale will likely take into account user engagement metrics, including page views, time spent on the page, and exit rate. Afterward, predictors related to readability will be used to predict the accessibility of articles. This project will also explore the use of neural nets in the prediction process.

Imad Rizvi is a rising junior at Yale University, studying Computer Science and Economics.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Imad aims to gain a better understanding of how legal news and commentary content varies by country and region and article type. He plans to explore the different topics focused on at the national and regional levels, as well as how language and rhetoric used to discuss countries and regions might change. Imad will use different forms of sentiment analysis including positive/negative analyses, subjectivity/objectivity analyses, and feature/aspect identification to facilitate comparisons, and will use various Python libraries to create deep learning models to conduct much of the sentiment analysis. He also plans to produce visualizations to demonstrate his findings.

Kaitlyn Sandor is a sophomore majoring in Computer Science at Yale University.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Kaitlyn will research the relationship between key historic events and related legal action. For example, after the George Floyd protests, how long will it take to see an uptick in news articles featuring legal action stemming from police brutality and racism? Her goal is to determine if clusters of legal action predictably follow historic events. She hopes this will help researchers, lawyers, and anyone interested, to find important articles and primary source documents by giving them a more precise time frame to research within. She plans to accomplish this by looking for clusters of cases within topics and mapping them to historic events related to that topic. If she discovers a predictable pattern, this correlation, she plans to create a neural network that, given the event topic, type, and size, predicts how long until legal action will be seen.