Are you a legal aid lawyer, court staff member, judge, academic, tech developer, computer science researcher, or community advocate interested in how AI might increase Access to Justice — and also what limits and accountability we must establish so that it is equitable, responsible, and human-centered?
Sign up at this interest form to stay in the loop with our work at Stanford Legal Design Lab on AI & Access to Justice.
We will be sending those on this list updates on:
Events that we will be running online and in person
Publications, research articles, and toolkits
Opportunities for partnerships, funding, and more
Requests for data-sharing, pilot initiatives, and other efforts
Please be in touch through the form — we look forward to connecting with you!
At the December 2023 JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, there is an academic workshop on AI and Access to Justice.
There is an open call for submissions to the workshop. There is an extension to the deadline, which is now November 20, 2023. We encourage academics, practitioners, and others interested in the field to submit a paper for the workshop or consider attending.
The workshop will be on December 18, 2023 in Maastricht, Netherlands (with possible hybrid participation available).
This workshop will bring together lawyers, computer scientists, and social science researchers to discuss their findings and proposals around how AI might be used to improve access to justice, as well as how to hold AI models accountable for the public good.
Why this workshop? As more of the public learns about AI, there is the potential that more people will use AI tools to understand their legal problems, seek assistance, and navigate the justice system. There is also more interest (and suspicion) by justice professionals about how large language models might affect services, efficiency, and outreach around legal help. The workshop will be an opportunity for an interdisciplinary group of researchers to shape a research agenda, establish partnerships, and share early findings about what opportunities and risks exist in the AI/Access to Justice domain — and how new efforts and research might contribute to improving the justice system through technology.
What is Access to Justice? Access to justice (A2J) goals center around making the civil justice system more equitable, accessible, empowering, and responsive for people who are struggling with issues around housing, family, workplace, money, and personal security. Specific A2J goals may include increasing people’s legal capability and understanding; their ability to navigate formal and informal justice processes; their ability to do legal tasks around paperwork, prediction, decision-making, and argumentation; and justice professionals’ ability to understand and reform the system to be more equitable, accessible, and responsive. How might AI contribute to these goals? And what are the risks when AI is more involved in the civil justice system?
At the JURIX AI & Access to Justice Workshop, we will explore new ideas, research efforts, frameworks, and proposals on these topics. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
Identify the key challenges and opportunities for using AI to improve access to justice.
Identify the key challenges and opportunities of building new data sets, benchmarks, and research infrastructure for AI for access to justice.
Discuss the ethical and legal implications of using AI in the legal system, particularly for tasks related to people who cannot afford full legal representation.
Develop proposals for how to hold AI models accountable for the public good.
Format of the Workshop: The workshop will be conducted in a hybrid form and will consist of a mix of presentations, panel discussions, and breakout sessions. It will be a half-day session. Participants will have the opportunity to share their own work and learn from the expertise of others.
Organizersof the Workshop: Margaret Hagan (Stanford Legal Design Lab), Nora al-Haider (Stanford Legal Design Lab), Hannes Westermann (University of Montreal), Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University), Quinten Steenhuis (Suffolk LIT Lab).
We welcome submissions of 4-12 pages (using the IOS formatting guidelines). A selection will be made on the basis of workshop-level reviewing focusing on overall quality, relevance, and diversity.
Workshop submissions may be about the topics described above, including:
findings of research about how AI is affecting access to justice,
evaluation of AI models and tools intended to benefit access to justice,
outcomes of new interventions intended to deploy AI for access to justice,
proposals of future work to use AI or hold AI initiatives accountable,
principles & frameworks to guide work in this area, or
Workshop: December 18, 2023 (with the possibility of hybrid participation) in Maastricht, Netherlands
More about the JURIX Conference
The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (JURIX) is an organization of researchers in the field of Law and Computer Science in the Netherlands and Flanders. Since 1988, JURIX has held annual international conferences on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.
This year, JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems will be hosted in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It will take place on December 18-20, 2023.
The proceedings of the conferences will be published in the Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Applications series of IOS Press. JURIX follows the Golden Standard and provides one of the best dissemination platforms in AI & law.
