Event, Video, PodcastOctober 16 2020

Lawgorithms: Everything Poverty Lawyers Need to Know About Tech, Law, and Social Justice

Michele Gilman, Meredith Broussard

Databite No. 138

Michele Gilman joins Professor Meredith Broussard in a conversation on enhancing the digital literacy of poverty lawyers to better advocate for social justice and the low-income communities they serve.

Automated decision-making systems make decisions about our lives, and those with low socioeconomic status often bear the brunt of the harms these systems cause. Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyers Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities is a guide by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman to familiarize fellow poverty and civil legal services lawyers with the ins and outs of data-centric and automated-decision making systems so that they can clearly understand the sources of the problems their clients are facing and effectively advocate on their behalf.

Resources

About the Speakers

Michele Gilman is the Venable Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She directs the Saul Ewing Civil Advocacy Clinic, in which student attorneys represent individuals and community groups in a wide array of civil litigation and law reform projects. She also teaches Administrative Law and Evidence. In addition, Michele serves as a co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism, which works to apply the insights of feminist legal theory to legal practice and policy. Her recent scholarship focuses on the intersection of data privacy and poverty, with articles published in the California Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Washington University Law Review, among others, as well as in the media, including The Huffington Post, Salon, and The Conversation.

Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the author of “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good. She is also interested in ethical AI and appeared in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment at the NYU Center for Data Science, a 2019 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Institute of Museum & Library Services as well as the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and other outlets. Follow her on Twitter @merbroussard or contact her via meredithbroussard.com.

About Databites

“Databites” is a regular speaker series that presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology today. Speakers bridge our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.