The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. My opinions do not reflect those of my employers or professional partners.

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Leaving the Bardo

Back in November, I welcomed you to the bardo. This was my not-so-extended metaphor about the interstitial state between one project (the Judicial Innovation Fellowship) and whatever came next. As I wrote then, “The time in the bardo can be short, it can be long, but it’s always finite. The experience can be easy or it can be hard, depending on the lessons you need to learn from the last life.”

In the months since, I spent time learning from the JIF experience by writing about crazy court facts, how bad courts can eat good policy, and the potential for foundational technologies, like middleware and AI benchmarks, to move court innovation forward. Each was a chance to explore and learn during that indeterminate time.

With those lessons in mind, I’m getting ready to leave the bardo and professionally reincarnate. Last week, it was announced that I will be the National Center for State Courts’ director for technology, data, and knowledge management starting in May.

I couldn't be more excited for this opportunity at this time. The intersection of technology and democratic institutions has never been more fraught, requiring innovative thinking and creative solutions. I'll be working alongside an amazing team of dedicated public servants, technologists, and court experts to help our state courts meet this moment, serve the public fairly, and uphold the rule of law.

As for the newsletter, I will keep it going. I anticipate taking a summer hiatus starting in a month, which will allow me some needed focus on the new job and to develop new ideas for the newsletter. In the meantime, please keep sharing your news, scholarship, opportunities, and events. Thank you, as always, for taking part in this project.

Best,

Jason

News

The federal courts outlined their case management modernization plan. (U.S. Courts)

Detectives test a potential crime fighting partner: AI. (The Washington Post)

Wildlife Conservation Police are searching thousands of Flock cameras for ICE. (404 Media)

Why some cities are shutting down Flock cameras amid privacy concerns. (The Guardian)

Structural barriers to the child welfare system for incarcerated parents. (A2J Lab)

When philanthropy mandates AI solutions, taxpayers pay the price. (FedScoop) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Yes, philanthropy should fund AI in government. (Recoding America Fund)

What the evolution of for-profit investment tells us about the future of giving. (SciPhi)

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Events

The National Center for Access to Justice is hosting an AI & Access to Justice conference April 21. (NCAJ) (h/t David Udell)

LawDroid’s AI Conference is April 28. (LD) (h/t David Gray)

We Robot 2026 is April 23-25 in Berlin. (WR)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Wikimania will be in Paris July 23-25. (WM)

The A2J Network Conference will be in Cincinnati October 21-22. (A2JN)

Jobs & Opportunities

Arnold Ventures is looking for a criminal justice innovation fellow. (AV)

The Brennan Center for Justice has multiple openings. (BCJ)

The Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple openings. (CDT)

[New] The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative needs a counsel for AI and tech. (CZI)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

[New] The Free Law Project is looking for court partners on its Litigant Portal project. (FLP)

[New] Google.org needs an evaluation team lead. (G.o)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

[New] The Kapor Foundation needs research fellows. (KF)

Maryland Legal Services Corporation needs a director of strategic technology. (MLSC) (h/t Dave Pantzer)

[New] OpenMinded needs a senior policy manager. (OM)

[New] The O'Shaughnessy Fellowships is accepting applications. (OF) (h/t Ben Metz)

Recidiviz needs a product manager. (R)

Recoding America Fund needs a head of strategic communication. (RAF)

[New] Renaissance Philanthropy is hiring for multiple roles. (RP)

The University of South Carolina needs a directors for its AI Ethics & Law Initiative. (USC) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

The University of Texas School of Law needs an AI and legal practice fellow. (UT)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. My opinions do not reflect those of my employers or professional partners.

Subscribe now

News

Absurd AI-powered lawsuits are causing chaos in courts. (Futurism) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Oregon attorney slapped with record fine after citing case law hallucinated by AI. (The Oregonian)

The Federal Judicial Center pulled the climate science chapter from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence after political pressure. (Ars Technica) The National Academies of Science, which produces the manual, didn’t. (Ars Technica)

Anonymous crime tip software was hacked. (Ars Technica)

Kash Patel admits under oath that the FBI is buying location data on Americans. (The Guardian) Policing in the age of self-surveillance. (NYU Press) “Sensorveillance” turns ordinary life into evidence. (IEEE Spectrum)

Public records shed light on the justice system, but it can be a battle to get them. (Marshall Project)

As Trump pushes deportations, immigration data becomes harder to find. (Associated Press)

Evaluating AI-assisted sentencing bias for California Racial Justice Act claims. (Arxiv)

A quantitative analysis of defense use of digital discovery in criminal cases. (Justice Quarterly)

A judge is irate as a defendant joins by Zoom while driving and lies about it. (Ars Technica)

Pro Bono Net is now Scale Justice. (LawNext)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a new leader. (Ars Technica)

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Events

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

We Robot 2026 is April 23-25 in Berlin. (WR)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Wikimania will be in Paris July 23-5. (WM)

The A2J Network Conference will be in Cincinnati in October. (A2JN)

Jobs & Opportunities

Arnold Ventures is looking for a criminal justice innovation fellow. (AV)

The Brennan Center for Justice has multiple openings. (BCJ)

The Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple openings. (CDT)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

Google.org has a new challenge for AI in government. (G.o)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

[New] Maryland Legal Services Corporation needs a director of strategic technology. (MLSC) (h/t Dave Pantzer)

Recidiviz needs a product manager. (R)

[New] Recoding America Fund needs a head of strategic communication. (RAF)

The University of South Carolina needs a directors for its AI Ethics & Law Initiative. (USC) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

[New] The Texas Indigent Defense Commission is hiring a data analyst. (TIDC)

The University of Texas School of Law needs an AI and legal practice fellow. (UT)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

News

How speech models miss what matters most. (Arxiv)

Perceived fairness of algorithms in medicine and law. (A2J Lab)

New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice. (Statescoop)

The reality of body cams. (Last Week Tonight)

How a license plate camera misread unraveled one man's life. (Business Insider)

Missouri police launched an audit portal of their use of license plate readers. (KSN16)

The debate in Maine over police drones and license plate readers. (NBC)

Border Patrol tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements. (404 Media)

ICE reveal surveillance app in court testimony. (The Guardian)

Proton Mail helped FBI unmask anonymous Stop Cop City protester. (404 Media) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

A people-centered justice approach to implementing AI governance. (NYU) (h/t Nate Edwards)

A bias murder homicide database launched. (University of Arkansas)

Distinguishing task-specific and general-purpose AI in regulation. (Arxiv)

The Crime Issue. (MIT Tech Review)

Share

Events

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

We Robot 2026 is April 23-25 in Berlin. (WR)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Wikimania will be in Paris July 23-5. (WM)

The A2J Network Conference will be in Cincinnati in October. (A2JN)

Jobs & Opportunities

Arnold Ventures is looking for a criminal justice innovation fellow. (AV)

The Brennan Center for Justice needs a technology policy strategist for its Liberty & National Security Program. (BCJ)

The Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple openings. (CDT)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

Google.org has a new challenge for AI in government. (G.o)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

[New] New York State needs a deputy director for its

[New] R Street is hiring an tech and innovation fellow. (RS)

Recidiviz needs a product manager. (R)

[New] Surveillance Tech Oversight Project needs a development manager. (STOP)

[New] The University of South Carolina needs a directors for its AI Ethics & Law Initiative. (USC) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

The University of Texas School of Law needs an AI and legal practice fellow. (UT)

The Z Smith Reynolds Foundation needs a program officer. (ZSRF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

After introducing the Court Innovation Fund and exploring how bad court function can hinder everything from affordable housing to national security, I’m now focusing on what a philanthropic fund can do to innovate courts and improve just outcomes. In this series, I previously wrote about the need for court AI benchmarking.

Court Innovation is Middleware

Access to justice is at the mercy of court case management systems (CMS).

A colleague’s recent experience in Oklahoma illustrates why. He and his team were working with a group that provides legal representation to people facing low-level charges in municipal court, the kind of charges that don’t guarantee you an attorney. Many waited up to two weeks in jail before lawyers even learned of the arrest—often accruing additional charges in the meantime.

Working together with the municipal court and the legal non-profit, my colleague’s team built software that connected the court’s data in its CMS to a dashboard for the non-profit. Now, the non-profit learns of arrests day of. Quicker representation led to prisoners spending less time in jail and accruing fewer add-on charges. All it took was a little bit of code to stitch it all together.

A court CMS manages how data is entered, structured, and ultimately used—making it the technical epicenter of the American justice system. The nearly 70 million cases processed each year should generate usable data to improve court function, expand access to justice, and even drive broader policy goals. Instead, foundational software failures leave that potential unrealized.

As part of the development of the Court Innovation Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, we want to fix that failure.

Middleware is the most transformative force in court technology that no one is talking about. This critical, behind-the-scenes infrastructure enables a CMS to seamlessly integrate with external software, like Oklahoma’s data portal, unlocking entirely new capabilities. When built well, middleware doesn’t just patch over outdated systems—it dismantles them. It breaks the stranglehold of vendor lock-in, liberates courts from brittle legacy architecture, and creates a scalable, frictionless foundation for innovation. The result isn’t incremental improvement; it’s a fundamental restructuring that opens a new market for court technology, strengthening the judiciary’s ability to serve the public.

The Disconnect

Before we get to the solution, let’s look into the problem. When we think of software, we often think of the user interface—not the hidden layers that make it work. This includes application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow software to interact with other software.

In my research from 2021, I found that APIs were barely an afterthought in justice technology. The absence of functioning APIs and middleware technology has created a literal disconnect in court software that undercuts the potential of even the most basic solutions.

As it stands, court CMS APIs–if they even exist–are bad and rarely meet modern software standards. Among other problems: Court APIs often lack documentation, making it a guessing game for a developer on how to plug into the CMS; there’s no success metrics, meaning that a developer won’t know if she’s successfully connected to the CMS without it being manually confirmed by court staff; and the APIs regularly break, restarting the development guessing game about how to connect.

When they fail, and they fail often, court functionality goes down with them, creating real world ramifications.

Take court text message reminders, one of the rare justice tech interventions that every study says works. They increase court appearance rates and reduce bench warrants and defaults—outcomes that spare people arrests, fines, and cascading legal trouble across criminal and civil dockets. In a rational system, text message reminders would be ubiquitous.

Yet they are not. Even when courts want them and funding exists, adoption stalls because plugging a third-party messaging service into a court’s CMS is technically prohibitive. The barrier is not policy, it is plumbing. Similar integration failures have stymied data analysis, self-help tools, and administrative reforms across the country.

Three major factors brought us here: capacity deficits, constrained budgets, and corporate capture.

Most courts lack the technical capacity to govern modern software systems. Critical technology decisions are often made without dedicated IT leadership or outsourced entirely to vendors. This trend is both explained and compounded by paltry court budgets. We simply don't invest enough to have good court software.

But it’s not just a government problem: the vendors want it this way. If you are a vendor with a multi-year CMS contract with a court, you want the court to come to you for all of its technical needs. That dependency, also referred to as vendor lock-in, is the business model. Easy, plug-and-play interoperability would let courts build on their own data, drawing business away from vendors. That is the perverse incentive at the heart of the problem: bad APIs are good business.

Middleware is the escape hatch

Middleware is a neutral software layer that sits between a court’s case management system and the outside world. Instead of forcing every new tool to integrate directly with a brittle, proprietary CMS, middleware standardizes the court’s data once and exposes it through a modern, reliable API. Once that layer exists, new functionality can plug in easily—without negotiating with the CMS or its vendor every time.

This solution is not theoretical. CourtStack, developed by the Los Angeles Superior Court and now active in at least 30 California counties, demonstrates the model in practice. Similar efforts are underway at Suffolk Law’s LIT Lab and the Free Law Project.

A nationwide middleware strategy would fundamentally restructure the court technology market by shifting power from vendors back to courts—and from closed systems to open innovation.

For courts, middleware would jailbreak their data and break the vendor chokehold. Features built on top of the middleware—text reminders, payment systems, data portals—would become portable, not tethered to the CMS. The ability to carry functionality across different CMS collapses switching costs and ends vendor inertia.

It would also replace today’s duplicative development model with a shared one. Instead of vendors rebuilding the same feature court-by-court, functionality developed once could deploy anywhere. Costs would fall, timelines would shrink, and experimentation would accelerate.

For the public, the impact would be immediate: courts could deploy tools that help people show up, pay, access records, and navigate proceedings without waiting years for vendor updates. Universities, nonprofits, and startups could build without negotiating costly custom integrations in every jurisdiction. The technical barrier to entry would vanish.

In short, middleware is not just a technical fix. It is the infrastructure for a competitive, innovative, and interoperable court technology ecosystem—one no longer constrained by proprietary vendors and long contracts.

These benefits are real, as we are seeing in California. However, to expand this idea beyond California, we need to dig deeper. To plan our funding strategy in this promising space, the Court Innovation Fund wants to study the CourtStack experience; understand the challenges of bringing new courts online, the costs of implementation, and the economics of scaling; and consider whether a play like this makes sense as a nonprofit or for-profit venture. We also need to ensure that this technology is improving court cybersecurity, and not creating an unwitting vector for attack.

An innovative court is connected to its data, the public they serve, and the future. Just look to Oklahoma, where a small layer of software shortened jail stays and prevented new charges. That wasn’t a feature upgrade, it was structural reform. Meanwhile, most of America’s courts are locked into a bad contract or legacy software, unable to connect to new data sources or add new tools. In a word, they’re trapped.

Middleware is how they break free.

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News

Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say. (Ars Technica)

Milwaukee officer charged for misuse of license plate reader to track someone he was dating. (New York Times)

Axon revenue surges as AI tools drive explosive growth. (The Guardian)

ICE tripled its reliance on Microsoft in last six months. (The Guardian)

Defense counsel type, defendant interventions, and punishment in a virtual pretrial courtroom. (Criminal Justice & Behavior)

Hidden in plain sight: Surveillance at the Arizona border. (The Border Chronicle)

Record clearing insights: How data can impact policy. (A2J Lab)

AI in policing: Transparency is the safeguard. (Right on Crime)

Events

Stanford is offering an Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy for Practitioners course on March 15. (SSHS)

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

We Robot 2026 is April 23-25 in Berlin. (WR)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Wikimania will be in Paris July 23-5. (WM)

The A2J Network Conference will be in Cincinnati in October. (A2JN)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] Arnold Ventures is looking for a criminal justice innovation fellow. (AV)

[New] The Brennan Center for Justice needs a technology policy strategist for its Liberty & National Security Program. (BCJ)

The Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple openings. (CDT)

[New] The Clean Slate Initiative needs a grants administrator. (CSI)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

[New] Google.org has a new challenge for AI in government. (G.o)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

[New] Pro Bono Net needs a software engineer. (PBN)

Recidiviz needs a product manager. (R)

Stanford’s Rhode Center on the Legal Profession needs an associate director of research. (SDRC) (h/t Natalie Knowlton)

TechTonic Justice is hiring for multiple roles. (TTJ)

The University of Texas School of Law needs an AI and legal practice fellow. (UT)

[New] The Z Smith Reynolds Foundation needs a program officer. (ZSRF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

News

ICE’s surveillance state isn’t tracking only immigrants. (New York Times)

ICE’s use of AI will lead to big mistakes, maybe that’s the point. (Rolling Stone)

Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown. (The Guardian)

ICE observer says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face. (Ars Technica)

Police told to be “as vague as permissible” about why they use Flock. (404 Media)

The problem with doorbell cams. (The Guardian)

Iran turns to digital surveillance tools to track down protesters. (New York Times)

Everything-everywhere searches and the geofence puzzle. (GW Journal of Law & Tech)

Rising legal tech giants will dominate—not democratize—legal practice. (Bloomberg)

An empirical study of prosecutorial bias in AI legal analysis. (Stanford Law)

Tyler Technologies acquires court recording company For the Record. (TYL)

New “Justice AI Tracker” watches how police and courts are using AI. (State Scoop)

New guidelines for using AI to aid civil legal service organizations. (NYSBA)

A rubric based approach to benchmarking LLMs used in real-world legal practice. (Alibaba Data) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

AI policy resources. (Github)

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Events

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Wikimania will be in Paris July 23-5. (WM)

Jobs & Opportunities

The Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple openings. (CDT)

[New] The Clean Slate Initiative needs a research manager. (CSI)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

[New] The Colorado Office of Alternate Defense Counsel is seeking a strategic data & financial analyst. (CAD)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

[New] The Hague University of Applied Sciences needs a consultant in law and tech. (HUAS)

[New] Humanity AI needs an ED. (HAI)

[New] Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System needs a law student intern. (IAALS)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

[New] The Law Enforcement Action Partnership needs a data analyst. (LEAP) (h/t Amos Irwin)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

The Montgomery County DA (Penn.) needs a data analyst. (MDA)

New America opened applications for its Eviction Data Response Network 2026 cohort. (NA)

[New] The New York City Mayor’s Office needs a senior advisor for tech and innovation. (NYC)

Recidiviz needs a product manager. (R)

[New] Stanford’s Rhode Center on the Legal Profession needs an associate director of research. (SDRC) (h/t Natalie Knowlton)

TechTonic Justice is hiring for multiple roles. (TTJ)

The University of Texas School of Law needs a AI and legal practice fellow. (UT)

[New] The Weil Legal Innovators Program is open to law students. (WLIP)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Court Innovation is Benchmarks

After introducing the Court Innovation Fund and exploring how bad court function can hinder everything from affordable housing to national security, I want to talk about what can be done to innovate courts and improve just outcomes. Starting today, I’m going to explore what a philanthropic fund focused on court innovation can accomplish and why it matters.

Time and again, justice technology developers do the justice system dirty. They’ve sold biased risk assessment tools, software packages that lead to false arrests and habeas petitions, and “AI” that wasn’t. This embarrassing trend persists because the justice system and its advocates don’t build the tools and practices needed to interrogate and validate technologies old and new.

It’s in this ecosystem that state and local courts expect to double their use of genAI this year. To state the obvious: the courts are not ready to vet AI—to know if an AI product does what the developers claim. This means untested technology will do everything from banal administrative tasks to review filings for judgment. Done incorrectly, genAI can wrongly take away people’s freedom, limit their access to justice, and demolish their economic well-being. Without standardization, evaluation, and training around genAI, courts run the risk of perpetuating existing harms and creating new ones at the scale and speed of AI.

As part of the development of the Court Innovation Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, we are exploring the development and use of AI benchmarks for court software. We believe that building benchmarks will create standards for court AI, incentivize a new generation of technologists to work on court innovation, and provide court officials actionable information when considering the purchase and adoption of AI systems.

First, a brief primer on benchmarks. Benchmarking is the process of figuring out if you can trust an AI system by gauging factors like accuracy or bias.

To accomplish this, a benchmark dataset has model inputs and model outputs. The inputs are the data that are fed into the model and the outputs are the ideal conclusion, like an answer sheet. To put this into context, say you wanted to test an AI model on how well it categorizes pictures of blueberry muffins and chihuahuas. You would put together a dataset of blueberry muffin and chihuahua images (model inputs) and feed them into the AI. Then you would compare the AI’s output (it’s attempt at classification) with the benchmark’s model outputs. The delta between the AI’s output and the benchmark’s model output is your accuracy number.

Once the developers get their accuracy numbers back, they can make improvements on their model and then test again. It’s through this iterative process that AI models become better and more trustworthy. When applying benchmarks to genAI, this form of validation is only more important as we are not just asking “can the software classify this?” but “does the software do what its developers claim?”

Benchmarks are standard across fields like education, medicine, and science. They are often made public, so anyone can test against them and the results can be viewed like a nerdy leader board. This is an incredibly powerful feedback loop that creates a level of standardization and transparency that would otherwise be missing. Yet, there is no concerted effort to create benchmarks for AI deployed in the courts.

This is problematic, because AI in the courts isn’t trouble ahead, it’s here now. AI tools are helping litigants fill out forms, draft police reports, and assist in courtroom interpretation. It’s also being developed and tested to review eviction and debt filings, helping a judge determine how she should rule.

I find filing review tools illustrative of the potential of genAI in the courtroom—for both court and public—and the dire need for benchmarks.

Debt cases, which already accounted for 1-in-4 civil cases in state courts before the pandemic, are surging across the country. Usually suing for $10,000 or less, debt buying companies file millions of cases across the U.S. with the hope that a defendant doesn’t appear in court. This allows the judge to rule against the defendant without considering the facts of the case. With that judgment, the company takes the defendant to collections, perpetuating a punishing cycle of debt. The problem is that many of these claims, drafted with the help of AI, do not pass basic scrutiny, like whether the defendant actually holds the debt.

To fight back against this predatory practice, states like Arizona and New York, now require a judge to assure that the claim meets statutory standards before entering a default judgment. This is a smart policy change to curb predatory debt suits. It also creates a massive administrative challenge for judges to sift through the ever-growing pile of claims. Luckily, it’s the perfect job for AI to automate the review process.

However, we’re left wondering: do these new review tools actually work? Without independent verification, we are left with two main mechanisms to vet court technology: asking other courts if they liked the tool and vendor ad copy. This status quo is woefully insufficient.

However, it’s easy to understand how we got here. Due to the significant costs, technical expertise needed, and logistical challenges collecting and publishing court data, there is a dearth of datasets available for research and development in the courts. Adding complication, benchmarks need to evolve over time either because the foundational models improve or the application of the tool changes. Collectively, these factors put benchmark development out of reach for most courts. This creates a need for this work at scale and to build a commons infrastructure that all courts can benefit from.

That is why the Court Innovation Fund is focused on building a strategy to develop benchmark datasets for courts. The first step will be to figure out the economics and practicalities of doing this work at scale and over time. With that information, we can bring foundational benchmarks to court AI. Doing so creates standardized, reliable data for building and evaluating the performance of new tools that support just outcomes. It also creates an easy on-ramp for technologists to explore how their technology could help court issues, expanding the coalition of people developing solutions for these problems. Last, it gives courts more information when considering AI adoption.

Courts are places for fact-finding. They provide a process to gather and assess evidence to determine the truth behind a legal claim. We can’t let AI's accuracy and dependability—literally its ability to be factual—fall short of the standards required in court. That is the path we are currently on. Luckily, we can do better.

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News

The war in Minnesota is for our phones. (New York Times)

The FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE, Patel says. (NBC)

The White House is altering ICE arrest photos, says “the memes will continue”. (Ars Technica)

How local police body cams help ICE. (NPR)

Palantir defends working with ICE to staff following Pretti killing. (Wired)

ICE keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous critics online. (Ars Technica)

TikTok, now under U.S. control, is collecting immigration status and gender identity. (AV Club)

UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake. (The Verge)

Interest in law school is surging, but AI makes the payoff less certain. (New York Times)

Angry Norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop Flock license plate scanners. (Ars Technica)

Oregon legislation poised to tackle “fishing expedition” searches of license plate data. (OPB)

States strengthen shield laws to protect abortion and gender-affirming care data. (Route Fifty)

All rise for judge GPT. (The Verge) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

The Honorable AI? (Lawfare)

AI video tools depict lawyers and judges as women at far lower rates than real life. (LawNext)

Reboot launched the Observatory of Public Sector AI. (Reboot)

There’s a new VC in the UK for early stage social ventures. (Social Tech Ventures)

Events

Pathfinders for Justice is hosting a virtual AI for Justice discussion Feb. 5. (PfJ)

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

[New] The Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple openings. (CDT)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)

[New] The Ford Foundation needs a director for its office of innovation. (FF)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

[New] The Montgomery County DA (Penn.) needs a data analyst. (MDA)

The Mozilla Foundation is accepting nominations for fellows. (MF)

[New] New America opened applications for its Eviction Data Response Network 2026 cohort. (NA)

Oregon Law Help needs a content creator. (OSB)

[New] Recidiviz needs a product manager. (R)

[New] RTI is looking for a director of data governance. (RTI)

[New] The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project needs a legal director. (STOP) (h/t Eleni Manis)

[New] TechTonic Justice is hiring for multiple roles. (TTJ)

[New] The University of Texas School of Law needs a AI and legal practice fellow. (UT)

Wired needs a senior politics reporter. (W)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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How Bad Courts Eat Good Policy

Before the holiday break, I laid out what I find to be the 10 most wild facts about the American court system. Today, in this ongoing series capturing my thinking about courts and court innovation, I wanted to expand the scope about what it means to talk about courts, why they matter, and why they require immediate attention.

Nationally, court budgets were slashed during the ‘08 Housing Crisis, leading to nearly two decades of underfunding and understaffing. Today, only about two percent of state court budgets nationally go to capital improvements, technology, and innovation, putting much needed upgrades out of reach. This decades-long reality has left courts struggling to improve operations, meet their legal requirements, and keep up with the ever changing technological times. But what’s most important to remember is that the courts are not a closed environment where these outdated systems merely impact people facing a legal issue. A poorly functioning court can unintentionally eat good public policy set by other branches of government, including affordable housing, public safety, national security, and more.

Take the Washington, D.C. housing court for example.

Due to old policy and procedure, landlord-tenant cases take over a year to resolve. As the backlog grows beyond 6,000 cases, back rent goes unpaid and evictions are unresolved, which negatively impacts those facing eviction and the community at-large.

For individuals, resolving an eviction—usually in the landlord’s favor—kicks off a cycle of poverty as public eviction records cost people employment and housing opportunities, kids have to abruptly change schools, and the evicted family can even lose their belongings in the process.

But the individual’s experience is only half the story. This court backlog also exacerbates the District’s affordable housing crisis. By leaving cases unresolved, rent goes unpaid and units can’t be re-rented, putting as many as 20,000 affordable units on the brink of foreclosure. The knock-on effects are clear: a court struggling to keep up can hurt people and devour local policy goals, like affordable housing.

Similarly, court malfunction can damage public safety. In California, hundreds of people convicted of vehicular manslaughter kept and even renewed their drivers licenses because courts failed to inform the DMV of their convictions. This failure was due to human and technical errors. Even though courts know how to collect and share data, as required by state law, these solvable issues went unnoticed and people who should have had their licenses revoked were still driving recklessly, getting into accidents, and creating new victims.

Then there’s our national security.

Just last week, it became public that the U.S. Supreme Court was hacked multiple times allegedly by a man in Tennessee. But this news is only the most recent in a long string of cybersecurity failures from the federal courts. Last year, it was disclosed that Russia hacked the federal court’s data system. This hack imperiled ongoing criminal investigations, classified intelligence, and prized trade secrets at issue in civil cases. Like the two examples above, the federal courts’ inability to secure its vulnerabilities hurts more than the courts themselves. As U.S. Senator Ron Wyden bluntly put it, “The federal judiciary’s current approach to information technology is a severe threat to our national security.”

What’s confounding is that the vulnerabilities exploited during the Russian hack were known back in 2020, when the federal courts experienced another major breach. (Yes, this happens that often.) The federal court’s collective mismanagement of their data systems has led to hundreds of threatened witnesses and dozens more murdered. Still, only last spring did the federal courts institute multi-factor authentication for all users, a cybersecurity practice widely adopted in the mid-2000s and established as the standard for the federal government in 2015.

These are just three examples of a national problem well known in the court reform community. But executive and legislative branch leaders from around the country still watch their policy agendas walk into court-shaped buzz saws of outdated process and inoperable technology. More examples abound from criminal justice to economic mobility and poverty alleviation policy efforts. If you’re skeptical, I ask that you go watch your local debt docket for an hour to see how courts are too often a platform for wealth redistribution going the wrong direction.

This national problem will likely compound our trouble ahead. With economic insecurity growing, the collapse in federal support to state and local justice systems, and the passage of H.R. 1—putting onerous, new requirements on Medicaid—we can expect a new wave of economic hardship cases to crash into courts barely treading water. Eviction, debt, and family violence cases all spike during times of economic decline. And demand on Medicaid will increase at a time when denials will skyrocket. Simultaneously, courts will grapple with a flood of AI-generated cases. All of which will break brittle, outdated systems already struggling to keep up. And when that dam breaks, there’s no part of our society that won’t feel the impact.

It’s this pressing reality that’s on our minds as we develop a philanthropic fund to innovate court capacity. Novel approaches to AI, improved data systems, software upgrades, staff training, procurement, and other interventions can help bolster these critical institutions. We aim to move courts from a forgotten periphery to an integral and co-equal branch of government when contemplating policy implementation. By doing so, we will increase support for the courts and improve their ability to serve the public, while still maintaining their independence. In the coming dispatches of this series, I’ll talk about ideas we have to set the courts moving in that direction.

Regardless of the intervention, however, the takeaway is this: court innovation isn’t just for the courts, it’s for the benefit of us all.

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News

The U.S. Supreme Court got hacked … 25 times … in two months … by the same guy. (Above the Law)

Inside ICE’s tool to monitor phones in entire neighborhoods. (404 Media)

From record clearance to takeoff, what happens when people learn they’re free? (LinkedIn) (h/t Colleen V. Chien)

The role of AI and predictive policing in crime prevention. (Rochester Institute of Technology)

AI-powered police cameras face pushback from Wisconsin communities. (Wisconsin Public Radio) (h/t Brittany Suszan)

What do police officers really think about body cameras? (A&E) (h/t Brittany Suszan)

Do judges actually read search warrants? (A2J Lab)

Data politics: How the French legal profession renegotiated judicial transparency. (Law & Social Inquiry)

Safeguarding human rights and judicial independence in the age of algorithmic justice. (UNESCO)

Expert predictions on what’s at stake in AI policy in 2026. (Tech Policy Press)

Events

The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)

Colorado Law is hosting a conference on asymmetries in communication tech, Feb. 1-2. (UCB)

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

The A2J Network is accepting submissions for its conference. (A2JN)

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

[New] Council for Court Excellence needs early career fellows. (CCE)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)

[New] The Indiana Supreme Court needs a data scientist. (ISC)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

The Kansas Courts need someone to run their language access program. (KC)

Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

The Mozilla Foundation is accepting nominations for fellows. (MF)

Oregon Law Help needs a content creator. (OSB)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is accepting paper submissions. (PLSC)

Wired needs a senior politics reporter. (W)

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Editor’s note: The version of the newsletter from this morning had a bad link for the Q & A. That’s been fixed.

A Conversation About the Court Innovation Fund

At the end of last year, I had the chance to do a Q+A with Kumar Garg, the President of Renaissance Philanthropy, where I’m the Court Innovation Fellow. In this role, I’m leading the development of a philanthropic fund focused on building the field of court innovation. Below is a selection of the conversation setting the stage of what the Court Innovation Fund is, what it can accomplish, and the AI of it all. Please visit the RenPhil website to read the whole interview.

KG: What sparked the idea of a potential Court Innovation Fund, and why is this moment different for courts and for justice innovation?

JT: For the past three and a half years, I co-designed and co-led the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown Law. This program placed technologists and designers in state and local courts to improve the courts’ responsiveness to public needs. In our final report, we identified multiple systemic chokepoints inhibiting court innovation in the U.S., and by extension people’s ability to access justice, economic mobility, and personal safety. Informed by this on-the-ground experience, we felt a dedicated fund for court innovation was overdue to build the field and overcome these chokepoints.

The timing for this work could not be more acute. The pandemic helped courts understand the cost of having incompatible technical systems, and AI is a wake up call for courts trying to keep up with the rapid state of change. If this one-two punch wasn’t enough, criminal justice reform and federal justice efforts are faltering and federal funding changes risk lost revenue and exploding dockets. Taken together, this moment requires innovative state and local courts to meet the moment and ensure equal justice for all. A focused philanthropic fund can be the catalyst.

KG: Courts are processing millions of cases a year and facing an “AI tsunami.” How do you think these technologies will reshape the front door of American democracy, and what’s at stake if courts don’t get ahead of it?

JT: This isn’t trouble ahead, the tsunami is here now. Late last year, I wrote about a bill in Wisconsin that would replace human court translators with AI software. As I outlined in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state will regret this bill becoming law, because the technology isn’t ready for high-stakes venues like the courts. This is for two reasons. First, most languages are “low-resource” meaning there isn’t a lot of content online in a language like Hmong, Wisconsin’s third most spoken language, which limits the ability to train an AI system to make accurate translations. Second, even a high-resource language like Spanish, which has lots of online content to train AI on, mistranslates legal terms. “Due date” becomes “date to give birth”, and the pronoun “su” (either “your”, “his”, “her”, or “their”) can be mistranslated, sowing confusion over property ownership or legal responsibility. These are not harmless errors, and if legislators in Wisconsin have their way the courts will have to figure out how to get to the facts of the case without a trustworthy translation.

This is just one example of the tsunami that’s already here. In other instances, court watchers are seeing an uptick of debt cases in state courts, which they believe is aided by AI. It’s already well documented that debt claims are often low quality and depend on the defendant not showing up to court to win. AI has the potential to supercharge this predatory practice. Courts are reacting by building automated AI review tools to ensure that debt claims are credible before ruling. While this is a welcome innovation, we lack the tools, like benchmarks, to know if these review tools are accurate or contain biases.

These two examples illustrate what is at stake for courts getting this moment right. Courts provide a process for fact finding and getting at the truth of a legal matter. To adopt AI translation services too early or to rely on unvalidated software to determine case outcomes risks the public’s trust. With nearly 70 million cases a year, courts are one of the most common touch points for the public and our government, getting it wrong there undercuts trust in our entire democratic system.

KG: Who needs to be at the decision-making table for responsible court modernization, particularly around AI governance and standards?

JT: Courts are how the public experience the law. This makes courts a critical service provider in need of public feedback to improve their services. But the public alone are insufficient by themselves. A goal of the Court Innovation Fund is to grow the coalition of people supporting court innovation. Obviously, we need judges, court administrators, IT staff, and other public servants involved in defining the needs and challenges of their demanding work. But we should also be thinking more broadly: there are unexplored issues impacting court modernization, including the economics of reform, the consumer harms created by private vendors, and how the increasing digitization of courts is creating cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Yet, we don’t see economists, consumer protection attorneys, or cyber experts coming to aid the courts.

As much as this potential Fund will organize the buyers and end users of court technology, we also need to incentivize on-ramps to other professions to expand the universe of potential solutions needed by the courts. This approach increases the internal capacity of courts to vet, develop, and deploy responsible, user-centered projects while growing the coalition of professionals in this space. That within itself would be an incredible innovation.

To read the entire interview, including what success of this fund looks like, please visit the RenPhil website.

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News

Alaska Courts built an AI chatbot—it didn’t go smoothly. (NBC) (h/t Brandon Sharp)

Axon tests face recognition on police body-worn cameras. (EFF)

AI police report writing software hallucinated someone turning into a frog. (Fox)

An interim evaluation of Utah’s Legal Regulatory Sandbox. (IAALS) (h/t Natalie Knowlton)

Building trust in AI through justice. (NYU)

Could stronger wage garnishment protections mean fewer debt collection lawsuits? (January Advisors)

Canada launches its AI register. (Teresa Scassa)

Events

The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)

Colorado Law is hosting a conference on asymmetries in communication tech, Feb. 1-2. (UCB)

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] The A2J Network is accepting submissions for its conference. (A2JN)

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

The Kansas Courts need someone to run their language access program. (KC)

Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

The Mozilla Foundation is accepting nominations for fellows. (MF)

[New] Oregon Law Help needs a content creator. (OSB)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is accepting paper submissions. (PLSC)

The Recoding America Fund has three open roles. (RAF)

Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big If True Science Accelerator is accepting applicants. (RP)

Tech Policy Press needs an assistant editor. (TPP)

Wired needs a senior politics reporter. (W)

Yale ISP is accepting resident fellow applications through the end of the year. (ISP)

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The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities.

10 Wild Facts about America’s Courts Pt. 2

Welcome back for part two! If you are just joining us, you can read the first five wild facts about America’s courts here. For those that just need a quick refesher, the first half of this list discussed how state and local courts account for nearly 99% of court cases in the U.S., that the wrong people go to jail when court IT goes sideways, and that litigants are not entitled to an attorney in the vast majority of court cases.

With that, let’s jump back in:

6. Most people go to court without an attorney.

With no right to an attorney in civil cases and attorneys being expensive, about 75% of civil cases have one person who represents themselves. It’s worse when we drill down. For example, only an average of 4% of those facing eviction have an attorney, versus 83% of landlords. How does this discrepancy impact so-called “self-represented litigants”? One study found a significant bias against people representing themselves in court, including that the monetary value of their claim was too high. By contrast, a randomized control trial found that people represented by an attorney in eviction court were 4.4 times more likely to retain possession of their apartments than similar tenants who didn’t have an attorney.

7. Judges don’t have to be lawyers.

You would think a self-represented person would have less legal training than the judge presiding over their case, but you’d be surprised. The majority of states allow for “lay judges,” these are judges that didn’t go to law school or pass the bar exam. In fact, they can come from any background, from mechanic to manicurist. This has some justification in rural and tribal communities, where access to justice is scarce. However, critical training and oversight are different from state-to-state and training is not required in some states before judges start deciding people’s fates. Luckily, the judicial system has checks on abuse and mistakes—the biggest being that a ruling is appealable to a judge with legal training.

8. Almost nothing gets appealed.

When any judge gets a legal issue wrong, the losing party can appeal to a higher court to consider the issue. But appeals cost money, they are confusing, and, as we mentioned, people don’t usually have an attorney. So, appeals don’t happen very often. For insight, we can look at states like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, which all maintain appeals data. They see appeal rates of civil and criminal cases at .5%, .4%, and .2%, respectively. Not cherry picked to make a point, these states are three of the top five states for number of appeals in the country in 2023. This means a ruling from a lay judge has the force of law and is the end of the legal road for most.

9. There’s only one national philanthropy dedicated to supporting the courts.

Whatever the actual number of courts in the U.S., having one philanthropy focused on the judiciary is a bad ratio. Philanthropy matters because it is a thought partner to government and non-profits and can catalyze experimentation with new, promising ideas—something that courts are hungry for and the public needs. The Pew Charitable Trusts is that sole philanthropy in America with a dedicated, national approach to court reform, and they do great work. However, there’s an endless amount of opportunity for further progress not being addressed. There are, of course, one-off grants here and there from philanthropies servicing criminal justice or economic mobility issues, for example. But that’s distinct from a dedicated court fund with a cohesive theory of change regarding the courts themselves. And while there are federal funding streams, like the State Justice Institute, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Legal Services Corporation—it’s an understatement to say that the future of those funds are uncertain.

10. There’s no national group that represents the public’s access to the courts.

There are plenty of organizations that help courts do better. Major national organizations train judges, improve court administration, and support ancillary groups, like legal aid, to support their clients in court. However, all of these groups are optimizing for different constituencies, like judges, court staff, technology vendors, or those that qualify for certain services. Not a single one considers the court-going public their chief constituency. Unfortunately, this makes sense, because courts were never designed for the public in the first place.

While each fact is presented separately, they don’t exist in a vacuum—every challenge compounds another. The person who doesn’t have a lawyer can’t figure out the court’s arcane rules also has their case heard by a lay judge and doesn’t understand their right to appeal. Making matters worse, there’s often no transcript of a trial, which means no one, including the court and the research community, knows what even happened! No matter how you define “justice”, this isn’t it.

While two part series focused on the most eye-widening facts about our courts, I want to be clear that it’s not a hit piece—it’s a call to action. Thousands of court employees across the U.S. are doing the best with the resources they’re given. But after decades of slashed budgets and courts being understaffed, cracks show no matter the dedication and creativity of our public servants. It’s a testament to them that the situation isn’t worse, and they need resources and broad spectrum support if we want things to be better.

As much as it might be hard to hear, this is the reality of our state and local courts and how the public experiences them. As we’ll see in future installments of this series, these challenges don’t stop at the courthouse steps. When outdated court processes and IT are allowed to fester, they can have society-wide ramifications. In short, we’re going to see how bad courts eat good policy.

We’re off for the rest of the year and will be back in your inbox January 6. Happy Holidays!

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News

Police swap suspect sketches for AI. (Washington Post) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

An AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls. (MIT Tech Review) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor. (The Guardian)

Understanding and improving the experience of pro se litigants in the trial court of Massachusetts. (Mass. Courts)

A federal court imposed sanctions for using generative AI without checking the output. (Eastern Dist. Michigan) (h/t Zach Zarnow) Something similar happened in a court in Oregon. (The Oregonian) (h/t John Grant)

A national collection of court standing orders and local rules on the use of AI. (Ropes & Gray) (h/t Natalie Roisman)

Policing children’s data. (Washington U. Law Review)

Grading machines: Can AI exam-grading replace law professors? (Virginia Law & Economics Research)

The Responsible AI Impact Report 2025. (All Tech is Human)

Suffolk Law announced LITEfile, “a simplified e-filing user experience for self-represented litigants.” (LITLab) (h/t David Colarusso)

People are outsourcing their thinking to AI. (The Atlantic)

Events

The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)

Colorado Law is hosting a conference on asymmetries in communication tech, Feb. 1-2. (UCB)

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

[New] Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

[New] The Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design, and the Ethics of Autonomy conference is accepting paper and panel submissions. (DC)

[New] The Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech is accepting postdoc submissions. (DLI)

[New] The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)

[New] The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

[New] The Kansas Courts need someone to run their language access program. (KC)

[New] Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

[New] The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

[New] The Mozilla Foundation is accepting nominations for fellows. (MF)

The Pew Charitable Trusts need an officer for its new State Science and Technology Policy Fellowship Initiative. (Pew)

[New] The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is accepting paper submissions. (PLSC)

The Recoding America Fund has three open roles. (RAF)

[New] Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big If True Science Accelerator is accepting applicants. (RP)

[New] The Sovereign Tech Fund needs a leader. (STF)

[New] Tech Policy Press needs an assistant editor. (TPP)

[New] Wired needs a senior politics reporter. (W)

[New] Yale ISP is accepting resident fellow applications through the end of the year. (ISP)

Leave a comment

The JT/DL is a newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities.

10 Wild Facts You Didn’t Know About America’s Courts Pt. 1

To complement the development of the Court Innovation Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy and my research at the Georgetown AI and the Legal Profession initiative, I’m starting an “open notebook” project. This project is a chance to share my evolving thinking around courts and court innovation, the public’s access to justice, and the catalytic role technology and philanthropy can play in ushering in a new era of responsive and accessible courts. Thank you to all my editors, especially Hannah Hartford, who helped improve this project.

For those of you I haven’t had a chance to meet, I’m Jason Tashea, the Court Innovation Fellow at Renaissance and AI and Courts Fellow at Georgetown. I’ve spent nearly 15 years at the intersection of justice systems and technology developing products; consulting courts; and researching and publishing on the space. I currently co-lead the Court Innovation Roundtable, a quarterly convening of national court innovation leaders, with Erika Rickard at the Pew Charitable Trusts. This is all to say: I spend a lot of time thinking about the courts and how they function.

I want to kick off this series with a two-part primer about the reality of America’s state and local courts.

Over the last five years, I’ve been focused on getting people to care about the courts. Specifically, I want them to care about local and state courts, the nucleus of our justice system. During this time, I’ve learned a lot about what shocks people the most when talking about these critical administrative systems of justice. While I’ve become inured to what I outline below, any interlocutor’s eyes usually go big when they hear it explained for the first time. And it’s my belief that this shock—as measured by the diameter of their visible eye—reflects them seeing the gravity of the problem for the first time. This recognition is a critical first step to bring them into the fold.

With that in mind, I wanted to catalog the 10 most wild facts about America’s courts. In a country where we have a strange exaltation of courts—enough to make endless TV shows, movies, and podcasts about them—what I include below should make us wonder if we’ve been sitting on our laurels and letting the chief administrator of the justice system, the courts, atrophy to our collective detriment. So, here we go:

1. State and local courts see 99% of all American cases.

With so much media coverage on the federal courts, you’d think that’s where all the action is, but it’s not. Nearly all of America’s most existential issues are litigated and resolved in our state and local courts. With almost 70 million cases a year—including evictions, divorces, traffic, and criminal matters—state and local caseloads dwarf the 760,000 cases the federal system sees each year, including bankruptcy cases. Not only are state and local courts how Americans experience the law, for many they are also how they experience government. The number of Americans in court per year is on par with our largest government programs, including Social Security (74.4 million) and Medicare (62.7 million). If docket size reflected media coverage, most would think the U.S. Supreme Court dominates. But on average, our highest court hears only about 80 cases a year.

2. We don’t know how many courts there are in the U.S.

Insane, right? But, really, we don’t. There’s anywhere between 3,000 to 10,000 state and local courts in the United States, and anyone who says they have an exact number is lying. Why don’t we know how many courts there are in the U.S.? Because it’s no one’s job to keep count.

3. A family of four spends more on groceries in a week than states do on courts in a year.

State and local courts rely on a mix of funding from state and local appropriations, court imposed fines and fees, and modest federal support. Courts can receive as little as .7 % of the state budget, as is the case in Texas, and as much as 3 percent, in the case of Oregon. In fact, in 2024, only about 1.4% of state budgets nationwide went to the courts. Put another way, state court spending is about $158 per resident, about half of what a family of four pays for groceries every week. With 98% of court budgets going toward salaries, just two percent is left for capital expenses, including technology.

4. Court IT is bad, and when it’s really bad you go to jail.

You read that right: when court tech doesn’t work, the wrong people wind up in prison. In multiple states, standard data transfers from old case management systems (CMS) to new ones led to closed warrants being reopened. Meaning, the next time that person is pulled over for an out taillight, they end up being arrested on an incorrect warrant. In other states, rolling out a new case management system has also meant people being kept in jail longer than their sentence. It shouldn’t be the case that launching a new court CMS leads to a habeas lawsuit, but here we are.

5. Your right to an attorney? Not so much.

If you’ve watched Law & Order, you know that you have a right to a lawyer and if you cannot afford one, one will be appointed. Well, that’s only in criminal court and not even all the time. In civil court—where people are evicted, get restraining orders, or try to get out from underneath medical debt—there’s no national right to counsel. It doesn’t matter that a civil case can become a criminal one if, for example, court imposed fines or fees go unpaid—people still don’t get a lawyer.

Well, that was a lot, and we’re only half way there. In the next essay, I’ll finish up this list and set up the coming pieces hoping to overcome or, dare I even say, fix these problems.

News

Prosecutors allegedly used AI to keep a man in jail. (New York Times)

Someone finally did an audit of a legal aid chatbot. (Duke)

How bureaucracy lost its builders. (State Capacitance)

A conversation about building a data commons for a New York police department. (Measures for Justice)

DNA collection poses tough ethical questions for criminal law. (Center Square)

The U.S. Crime Victimization Survey for 2023 is out. (BJS)

An introduction to relational procurement. (Digital Public)

OnlyFans starts criminal background checks of its creators. (404 Media)

Inside ICE defense training on Fortnite. (404 Media)

Events

The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)

Jobs & Opportunities

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

The Fortune Society needs a data analyst. (FS)

The Free Law Project needs a backend developer. (FLP)

[New] The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

The Harvard Belfer Center is accepting fellowship applications. (HBC)

[New] Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)

The Pew Charitable Trusts need an officer for its new State Science and Technology Policy Fellowship Initiative. (Pew)

[New] The Recoding America Fund has three open roles. (RAF)

[New] The Recoding America Fund also is accepting RFIs for potential AI projects. (RAF)

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Welcome to the Bardo

Like many, I’ve spent this year wrapping my head around the moment we’re living through. As the federal government’s actions tear up laws and norms in dangerous and capricious ways, I’m left with a droning sense of uncertainty that at times feels paralyzing. With the attacks on institutions that I work for (Georgetown University) and with (courts around the country), it’s a struggle at times to know where my effort is best placed. Knowing important work needs to be done now, I also find myself looking to the future and thinking about what happens the day after.

It’s within this tension that I’ve been contemplating the bardo. This is the Buddhist concept of an impermanent space where a soul waits between death and rebirth for a new, yet unforeseen life. The time in the bardo can be short, it can be long, but it’s always finite. The experience can be easy or it can be hard, depending on the lessons you need to learn from the last life. The bardo is our moment distilled.

It’s in this moment that my work also finds itself in a liminal state. Wrapping up the Judicial Innovation Fellowship has been bittersweet. We ran a successful pilot and proved our point unequivocally: technical fellowships in state and local courts demonstrably improve the institution and help the public. However, as we note in our final report, funding court innovation is hard and there are systemic challenges we need to overcome if that’s going to change.

There’s lessons to learn from this experience. And it’s my intent to do so in my new roles as the Court Innovation Fellow at Renaissance Philanthropy and the Court and AI Fellow at the Georgetown AI and the Legal Profession initiative. The fellow role is often an interstitial one, a place between two larger projects, and that is no different for me.

I’ll be using these new roles to think through lessons I haven’t quite figured out about court innovation:

• What does a holistic court innovation theory of change look like?

• What does it take to build AI sophistication for the courts?

• How can the courts be best serviced by philanthropy?

• Why should anyone care?

Starting after the Thanksgiving holiday, I’ll be sharing my thinking on these questions through this newsletter. Taking an open notebook approach, it’s also an invitation for engagement from you. I hope this experiment will spark more conversation and thinking about these challenging issues and guide us toward potential solutions.

While this is a change from the newsletter’s previous format, I will continue to include news, jobs, and events in these posts. So, please send me your job descriptions, opportunities, and recent publications to share with our community. This change will be a work in progress, and if you feel like I’m missing the point (or the moment), as usual, your feedback is welcome and appreciated.

In the meantime, welcome to the bardo.

-Jason

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News

AI’s accuracy and dependability can fall short of standards required in court. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Police in Pennsylvania use AI to communicate with non-English speakers. (NBC) (h/t Brittany Suszan)

From courthouse to keyboard: The rising cost of the North Carolina courts digital conversion. (News & Observer)

Courts don’t know what to do about AI crimes. (Rest of World)

ICE released a facial recognition app for local police. (404 Media)

Judge rules that Flock surveillance images are public records that can be requested by anyone. (404 Media) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Artificial intelligence in judicial systems: promises and pitfalls. (United Nations)

The State of AI Ethics Report. (Montreal AI Ethics Institute) (h/t Sean McDonald)

Measuring what matters: Construct validity in LLM benchmarks. (NeurIPS) (h/t Patrick Yurky)

Making government work for the people. (The States Forum)

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Jobs & Opportunities

Arnold Ventures has two positions open. (AV)

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

The Fortune Society needs a data analyst. (FS)

The Free Law Project needs a backend developer. (FLP)

The Harvard Belfer Center is accepting fellowship applications. (HBC)

The Pew Charitable Trusts need an officer for its new State Science and Technology Policy Fellowship Initiative. (Pew)

Upturn is looking for an executive director. (Up)

Editor’s Note

Last you heard from me it was May 15, 2023, and I was headed into summer break. The newsletter usually takes a break in the summer, but then fall, winter, spring, summer again, and one more fall passed with nothing from me. The short reason for the long silence is that I was focused on building and running the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown Law. It proved a big undertaking, and I paused my other interests, like the newsletter, to give it my undivided attention.

As you might have already guessed from the subject line, the JIF pilot came to an end and we’ve got some stories to share—more on that below. What matters for the newsletter is that I will formally relaunch a new version of the JTDL in the new year. More specifics on that when you hear from me again.

Thank you for not unsubscribing over the past 500 some odd days. It’s good to be back and in your inbox again. Have a great holiday. Talk to you in 2025.

-Jason

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Judicial Innovation Fellowship Final Report

Two and a half years ago, the Judicial Innovation Fellowship (JIF) at Georgetown Law set out to build a new type of program: one that would help courts better support their patrons by embedding technologists and designers within specific courts, as JIF-sponsored and -managed fellows.

To determine whether this program should become an ongoing facet of the court modernization landscape, we set out to answer three questions:

1. Would courts want to participate in a program like this?

2. Would technologists and designers want to work in courts?

3. If we brought courts and technologists together, would anything good happen?

Now, at the end of the program’s inaugural class, we can report that the answer to each question is unequivocally “yes.” The JIF fellows were able not only to deliver on their technical and design projects, but also to demonstrate the value of their technical and design skills in the day-to-day work of the courts. In doing so,they helped courts change how they operate, as well as seed systemic change.

Among other accomplishments, our three fellows redesigned court forms that were then approved for official use; improved usability of data systems to decrease input errors; and inspired a court to develop a tool in-house, instead of relying on a subpar, out-of-house vendor. In one instance, proving the long-term and unique value of talent not usually hired by courts, one court offered to create a new position to retain their JIF fellow. And in all three courts, our fellows voluntarily offered to provide support to their courts after the end of the fellowship.

What’s listed here only scratches the surface of what we were able to accomplish together. To dig into the weeds on what happened and what we learned, please give our final report a read.

As for what’s next: We are taking some time to think deeper about the lessons we learned and how we can tackle upstream problems that not only impact JIF but other programs looking to make our court systems better too.

We are grateful to everyone that made this successful pilot possible, from our thought partners to our funders and especially to our fellows and court partners. It was a fantastic group effort.

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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Editor’s Note

It’s that time of year again, flowers are in bloom, temperatures are rising, and newsletter open rates are falling. Which is all to say: the newsletter is going on summer hiatus. Thank you again for everyone that makes this newsletter worthwhile. From those sharing their work and opportunities to those providing feedback to everyone that makes this a part of their week. Have a great summer, and see you in September.

Jason

News

Crime trends in 2021–22, what we know so far. (Brennan Center)

Colorado Supreme Court hears first-of-its-kind challenge to police’s use of Google search terms. (Denver Post)

North Carolina bill would allow police to track phones without warrant. (WRAL)

Missing body cam video obtained after yearlong data practices fight in Minnesota. (ABC)

Digital system for immigration bonds is a mess. (Prism)

San Bernardino County paid a $1.1 million ransom to the hacker of the Sheriff’s Department’s computers. (The Sun)

Creating space for criminal justice analysts. (Justice Innovation Lab) (h/t Kelli Ross)

The White House challenged hackers to break top AI models at DEF CON. (Ars Technica)

Share

Events

The American Bar Association’s Zero Privacy Post-Dobbs? How the Threat Landscape Has Changed is May 16. (ABA) (h/t Chris Frascella)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

WeRobot is September 29-30. (WR)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] The ACLU needs an associate in privacy and data governance. (ACLU) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

Arizona State’s Center for Science and Imagination is accepting applications for the Leonardo Imagination Fellowship. (ASU)

The Brennan Center needs an editor for its new State Court Report program. (BC) (h/t Ashwin Ramaswami)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse needs remote volunteers. (CU) (h/t Alana Ramjit)

Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

The Ford Foundation needs a program officer for tech and society. (FF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Frontline Justice needs a CEO. (FJ)

Georgetown is accepting applications for its masters in law and tech program. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

Georgetown’s Institute for Tech Law and Policy has a student writing competition. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

Illinois Legal Aid Online needs a legal content manager. (ILAO)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Legal Services Corp. needs a research associate. (LSC) (h/t Dan Bernstein)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

[New] Microsoft needs a technical advisor for justice reform. (M) (h/t Elizabeth Grossman)

The National Center for State Courts needs an A2J consultant. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

The National Center for State Courts needs a tester for a court interpreter portal and database. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

Raheem is hiring for numerous roles. (R)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Tech Matters needs a research assistant for a new book and a data commons project. (TM)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

[New] UPenn’s Center for Inclusive Innovation & Technology needs and ED. (UP)

The University of Virginia needs a fellow focused on data and democracy. (UVA)

Willful is hiring a head of legal. (W) (h/t Erin Bury)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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News

The LAPD sued a journalist for using publicly available headshots of cops in a copwatch database. (Intercept)

New ICE privacy impact assessment showed all the ways the agency fails to protect immigrants’ privacy. (EPIC)

A computer system used to hunt fugitives is still down 10 weeks after a hack. (Washington Post)

Twitter abruptly stops reporting on government requests as data reveals Elon obeys demands more often than old Twitter. (Tech Dirt)

Lena Khan: We must regulate AI, here’s how. (New York Times) The Biden Administration announced new actions to promote responsible AI innovation that protects Americans’ rights and safety. (White House) Federal partners confirm automated Systems are not an excuse for lawbreaking behavior. (Consumer Fraud & Protection Bureau)

A Paris Agreement for AI bias. (AI & Society)

Nigerians blackmailed by loan apps are plotting revenge in Facebook groups. (Rest of World)

Bay Area Legal Services launched FosterPower, a collection of tools and resources for foster youth. (FP) (h/t David Gray)

Share

Events

The American Bar Association’s Zero Privacy Post-Dobbs? How the Threat Landscape Has Changed is May 16. (ABA) (h/t Chris Frascella)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

WeRobot is September 29-30. (WR)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] Arizona State’s Center for Science and Imagination is accepting applications for the Leonardo Imagination Fellowship. (ASU)

The Brennan Center needs an editor for its new State Court Report program. (BC) (h/t Ashwin Ramaswami)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse needs remote volunteers. (CU) (h/t Alana Ramjit)

Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

The Ford Foundation needs a program officer for tech and society. (FF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Frontline Justice needs a CEO. (FJ)

Georgetown is accepting applications for its masters in law and tech program. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

Georgetown’s Institute for Tech Law and Policy has a student writing competition. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

[New] Illinois Legal Aid Online needs a legal content manager. (ILAO)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

[New] Legal Services Corp. needs a research associate. (LSC) (h/t Dan Bernstein)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

The National Center for State Courts needs an A2J consultant. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

The National Center for State Courts needs a tester for a court interpreter portal and database. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

The Oxford Internet Institute needs a post-doc researcher for their trustworthiness auditing AI project. (Ox)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

Raheem is hiring for numerous roles. (R)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Tech Matters needs a research assistant for a new book and a data commons project. (TM)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

The University of Virginia needs a fellow focused on data and democracy. (UVA)

Willful is hiring a head of legal. (W) (h/t Erin Bury)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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News

AI is poised to hinder, not help, access to justice. (Reuters) Why can't I have a robot lawyer? (SSRN)

AI could aid in evaluating parole decisions. (UC Davis)

Time to reconsider if accused persons should be named before their conviction. (Today)

The rapid and unregulated growth of e‑messaging in prisons. (Prison Policy)

A New York court ruled that state police can’t keep hiding its misconduct records from the public. (Tech Dirt)

The US Dept. of Justice and Bureau of Prisons are teaming up to provide civil legal aid to incarcerated people. (DOJ)

Making crime visible in the digital age. (Critical Criminology)

Purported Wikipedia use by Ireland’s High Court judges. (Fifth Court) (h/t Brian Flanagan)

The Justice Innovation Lab launched a new blog. (Medium) (h/t Kelli Ross)

A Brazilian judge banned Telegram amid school attacks inquiry. (New York Times)

Rent-a-Hitman site nabbed Air National Guardsman who was “excited” to kill. (Ars Technica)

The high cost of being poor. (New York Review of Books)

Share

Events

George Washington University is hosting a panel on prosecution and police accountability on May 2. (GW) (h/t Jared Fishman)

The American Bar Association’s Zero Privacy Post-Dobbs? How the Threat Landscape Has Changed is May 16. (ABA) (h/t Chris Frascella)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

WeRobot is September 29-30. (WR)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] The Brennan Center needs an editor for its new State Court Report program. (BC) (h/t Ashwin Ramaswami)

[New] Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse needs remote volunteers. (CU) (h/t Alana Ramjit)

[New] Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

The Ford Foundation needs a program officer for tech and society. (FF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Frontline Justice needs a CEO. (FJ)

Georgetown is accepting applications for its masters in law and tech program. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

[New] Georgetown’s Institute for Tech Law and Policy has a student writing competition. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

The Legal Services Corporation has tech and innovation RFPs open. (LSC) (h/t Sarah Abdelhadi)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Just Tech has numerous openings. (JT) (h/t Legal Tech Jobs)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

The National Center for State Courts needs an A2J consultant. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

[New] The National Center for State Courts needs a tester for a court interpreter portal and database. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

The Oxford Internet Institute needs a post-doc researcher for their trustworthiness auditing AI project. (Ox)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

[New] The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

Raheem is hiring for numerous roles. (R)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Surveillance Resistance Lab needs a senior research fellow. (SRL) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

Tech Matters needs a research assistant for a new book and a data commons project. (TM)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

The University of Virginia needs a fellow focused on data and democracy. (UVA)

Willful is hiring a head of legal. (W) (h/t Erin Bury)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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Editor’s Note

The newsletter will be off next week. Enjoy spring!

-Jason

News

The Judicial Innovation Fellowship was featured in an article about justice entrepreneurship. (Reuters)

Policing software was blamed in at least three states for errors, including losing a criminal case and crashing during 911 calls. (NBC)

AI is coming for lawyers, again. (New York Times) AI isn’t going to save us. (Rest of World)

Robot lawyers are about to flood the courts. (Wired)

Central Indiana police encrypt their radios. (Indy Star)

ShotSpotter changed its name and launched a new platform. (Bloomberg) ShotSpotter—or, whatever—is sending police to the wrong areas. (Eric Piza)

Los Angeles does the police union’s dirty work by suing a person over public records he legally obtained. (Tech Dirt) The Massachusetts State Police failed twice to redact troopers’ birth dates in public records responses. (Tech Dirt)

A tiny blog took on big surveillance in China—and won. (Wired)

A judge in Colorado is adding plain language summaries to her rulings. (Law.com)

You can browse Ann Arbor crime statistics on a new transparency dashboard. (WDIV)

User-centered design guidelines for public benefit sites. (Route Fifty)

What if we could just ask AI to be less biased? (MIT Tech Review)

Eric Adams sure loves his robot cop toys. (Hell Gate)

Share

Events

The New York Courts’ technology conference is April 18-9. (NYC) (h/t James Carey)

Meta Lab’s conversation on the personal cost of human rights work is April 19. (ML)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

WeRobot is September 29-30. (WR)

Jobs & Opportunities

Aspen Tech Policy Hub’s Nonprofit and Public Interest Policy Training Fellowship is accepting applicants. (ATPH)

Baltimore City is looking for data fellows program manager. (Balt)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

[New] Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse needs remote volunteers. (CU) (h/t Alana Ramjit)

Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

The Ford Foundation needs a missions investments technology fellow. (FF)

[New] The Ford Foundation needs a program officer for tech and society. (FF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

[New] Frontline Justice needs a CEO. (FJ)

[New] Georgetown is accepting applications for its masters in law and tech program. (GU) (h/t Mary Pat Dwyer)

The Legal Services Corporation has tech and innovation RFPs open. (LSC) (h/t Sarah Abdelhadi)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Just Tech has numerous openings. (JT) (h/t Legal Tech Jobs)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

[New] The National Center for State Courts needs an A2J consultant. (NCSC) (h/t Zach Zarnow)

Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

[New] The Oxford Internet Institute needs a post-doc researcher for their trustworthiness auditing AI project. (Ox)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

Raheem is hiring for numerous roles. (R)

Rejis needs an executive director. (R) (h/t Anjali Fernandes)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Surveillance Resistance Lab needs a senior research fellow. (SRL) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

Tech Matters needs a research assistant for a new book and a data commons project. (TM)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

The University of Florence (Italy) is seeking applicants for its school on digital constitutionalism. (UF)

The University of Virginia needs a fellow focused on data and democracy. (UVA)

[New] Willful is hiring a head of legal. (W) (h/t Erin Bury)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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News

The North Carolina Courts’ $100 million eCourts mess. (Assembly)

Clearview AI scraped 30 billion images from Facebook and gave them to the cops. (Business Insider)

ICE is grabbing data from schools and abortion clinics. (Wired)

The DEA has added Apple’s AirTags to its surveillance arsenal. (Tech Dirt)

ChatGPT cannot be a panacea for access to justice. (Law360) OpenAI was threatened with a landmark defamation lawsuit over ChatGPT’s false claims. (Ars Technica) ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law professor as the accused. (Washington Post)

The high cost of staying in touch while incarcerated can linger long after release. (PBS)

Mexicans say some police officers are taking bribes with mobile payment services. (Rest of World)

Why do Western governments delegate border control to AI more and more? (Global Voices)

Teaching inmates in Argentina to make video games in prison. (Rest of World)

A guiding framework to vetting public sector technology vendors. (Ford Foundation)

Artificial intelligence and the courts: Materials for judges. (AAAS)

Share

Events

Stanford CodeX’s FutureLaw is April 13. (CX)

I’ll be speaking at Hofstra’s Technological Growth in Tort Liability & Practice April 14. (Hofstra)

Meta Lab’s conversation on the personal cost of human rights work is April 19. (ML)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

WeRobot is September 29-30. (WR)

Jobs & Opportunities

Aspen Tech Policy Hub’s Nonprofit and Public Interest Policy Training Fellowship is accepting applicants. (ATPH)

Baltimore City is looking for data fellows program manager. (Balt)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

[New] Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

The Ford Foundation needs a missions investments technology fellow. (FF)

The Legal Services Corporation has tech and innovation RFPs open. (LSC) (h/t Sarah Abdelhadi)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Just Tech has numerous openings. (JT) (h/t Legal Tech Jobs)

JusticeText needs a marketing lead. (JT) (h/t Devshi Mehrotra)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

Raheem is hiring for numerous roles. (R)

Rejis needs an executive director. (R) (h/t Anjali Fernandes)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Surveillance Resistance Lab needs a senior research fellow. (SRL) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

[New] Tech Matters needs a research assistant for a new book and a data commons project. (TM)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

[New] The University of Florence (Italy) is seeking applicants for its school on digital constitutionalism. (UF)

[New] The University of Virginia needs a fellow focused on data and democracy. (UVA)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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Editor’s Note

Applications for the Judicial Innovation Fellowship close this Friday at 12pm PT. We’ve already received a number of great applicants, and I would appreciate your help in finding a few more. I’d appreciate shares of our posts on Twitter and LinkedIn (a supportive comment would be extra kind). As well, if you are in any Slack groups or on listservs that you think would be interested in our tech and design work, I’ve included some copy below for reposting.

On a personal note, I just want to thank everyone who has been so supportive as we’ve gotten this project off the ground. People in this community have offered their time, expertise, and resources to make this program a reality. So, to everyone that’s made this work possible: thank you.
- Jason

For reposting:
The Judicial Innovation Fellowship is an exciting new opportunity for technologists, data scientists, and designers to use their talents for justice.

They are currently accepting applications through April 7 at 12pm PT. Projects include developing internal processes for court customer development research and a style guide for court tools; designing an electronic filing system that works for people without a lawyer; and auditing how courts and information technology departments share data to understand court patron experiences across government services, the criminal justice system, and court debt obligations in an effort to break cycles of debt, homelessness, and criminal recidivism. Job postings are open for these positions in Hamilton County, Tennessee (Chattanooga), Kansas City, Kansas, and Salt Lake City, Utah.

News

AI, brain scans, and cameras: the spread of police surveillance tech. (New York Times)

Neurotech’s battles impact our brains’ future, mental sovereignty is no longer a given. (Spectrum IEEE) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Police relied on hidden technology and put the wrong person in jail. (New York Times)

The DEA bought customer data from rogue employees instead of getting a warrant. (Vice)

The walls are closing in on Clearview AI. (MIT Tech Review) Clearview AI has been used nearly one million times by US police. (BBC)

A judge ruled that the NYPD must overhaul its data systems to end its unlawful use of sealed arrest records. (Bronx Defenders)

Sixty percent of consumers turn to AI for general legal advice. (ABA Journal)

Law’s AI revolution is here. (Canadian Bar Association)

A US agency rejected face recognition and landed in big trouble. (Wired)

The Greek government used predator spyware to spend a year surveilling a US citizen. (Tech Dirt)

A new podcast by the California Innocence Project was launched. (Legal Talk Network) (h/t Laurence Colletti)

Share

Events

Suffolk Law’s LIT Con and DocaCon are April 3-4. (SL)

Harvard presents Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind April 6. (BKC)

Stanford CodeX’s FutureLaw is April 13. (CX)

Meta Lab’s conversation on the personal cost of human rights work is April 19. (ML)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

WeRobot is September 29-30. (WR)

Jobs & Opportunities

Aspen Tech Policy Hub’s Nonprofit and Public Interest Policy Training Fellowship is accepting applicants. (ATPH)

Baltimore City is looking for data fellows program manager. (Balt)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

The Ford Foundation needs a missions investments technology fellow. (FF)

[New] The Legal Services Corporation has tech and innovation RFPs open. (LSC) (h/t Sarah Abdelhadi)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Just Tech has numerous openings. (JT) (h/t Legal Tech Jobs)

The Judicial Innovation Fellowship is looking for fellows. (JIF)

JusticeText needs a marketing lead. (JT) (h/t Devshi Mehrotra)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Measures for Justice needs a comms director. (MfJ)

Northeastern University needs an AI and social justice prof. (NU)

Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

[New] Raheem is hiring for numerous roles. (R)

Rejis needs an executive director. (R) (h/t Anjali Fernandes)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Surveillance Resistance Lab needs a senior research fellow. (SRL) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

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News

A study of ShotSpotter in Kansas City finds “no meaningful change” in violence. (Albuquerque Journal)

The FCC requires prison phone companies to provide video options for the deaf. (Marshall Project)

Comprehensive Illinois gun violence data is “unattainable.” (Quad-City Times)

Baltimore County reports one set of sexual assault data to the FBI, they tell the public another story. (Baltimore Banner)

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals tells Twitter it can’t reveal exactly how many national security letters it receives because the DOJ showed it some scary stuff. (Tech Dirt)

The TSA confirms biometric scanning won’t be optional, even for domestic travelers. (Tech Dirt)

ChatGPT-like AI will not change our world. (Internet Policy Review) Algorithmic black swans. (SSRN)

How California and other states are tackling AI legislation. (Brookings)

Drafting the job specs for a re-imagined data stewardship role. (Medium)

Thomson Reuters expands support of the SALI legal open standard. (Thomson Reuters)

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Events

Georgetown’s Cop Out: Automation in the Criminal Legal System event is March 29. (GULC)

Harvard’s Technology and the Public Interest talk is March 29. (BKC)

Suffolk Law’s LIT Con and DocaCon are April 3-4. (SL)

Harvard presents Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind April 6. (BKC)

Stanford CodeX’s FutureLaw is April 13. (CX)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] Aspen Tech Policy Hub’s Nonprofit and Public Interest Policy Training Fellowship is accepting applicants. (ATPH)

Baltimore City is looking for data fellows program manager. (Balt)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

The Engine Room needs a senior research associate. (ER)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

[New] The Free Law Project needs a development director. (FLP) (h/t Mike Lissner)

[New] The Ford Foundation needs a missions investments technology fellow. (FF)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Just Tech has numerous openings. (JT) (h/t Legal Tech Jobs)

The Judicial Innovation Fellowship is looking for fellows. (JIF)

JusticeText needs a marketing lead. (JT) (h/t Devshi Mehrotra)

MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Measures for Justice needs a comms director. (MfJ)

Northeastern University needs an AI and social justice prof. (NU)

[New] Open Contracting Partnership has a grant for procurement reformers. (OCP) (h/t Reilly Martin)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

Rejis needs an executive director. (R) (h/t Anjali Fernandes)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Surveillance Resistance Lab needs a senior research fellow. (SRL) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)

The news, events, and opportunities in justice tech and science. Want to post in the newsletter? Simply reply to this email.

Subscribe now

News

Can a robot lawyer defend itself against a class action lawsuit for unauthorized practice of law? (Tech Dirt)

Disrupting data cartels by editing Wikipedia. (SSRN) (h/t Ashwin Ramaswami)

Artificial intelligence, virtual courts, and real harms. (Lawfare) (h/t Irina Raicu)

Legislation to ban the government’s use of facial recognition hits the US Senate for the third time. (Engadget)

Macon, Georgia’s new surveillance project raises privacy concerns. (GovTech)

Germany’s Parliament rejects the EU Commission’s call for client-side scanning. (Tech Dirt)

The Legal Services Corporation posted talks and panels from this year’s Innovations in Technology Conference. (LSC)

Migrants must overcome a new barrier at the border: The U.S. government’s terrible app. (Rest of World)

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Events

Georgetown’s Cop Out: Automation in the Criminal Legal System event is March 29. (GULC)

Harvard’s Technology and the Public Interest talk is March 29. (BKC)

Suffolk Law’s LIT Con and DocaCon are April 3-4. (SL)

Stanford CodeX’s FutureLaw is April 13. (CX)

The Code for America Summit is May 16-17. (CfA)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is June 1-2. (PLSC)

RightsCon is June 5-8. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

Baltimore City are looking for data fellows program manager. (Balt)

Center for Democracy and Technology has multiple open positions. (CDT) (h/t Alex Givens)

The Criminal Justice Administrative Records System needs data fellows. (CJARS)

Data and Society is hiring for various roles. (DS)

[New] The Engine Room needs a senior research associate. (ER)

The Federal Trade Commission needs technologists. (FTC)

The Journal of Science and Law is accepting papers on justice tech. (JSL) (h/t Sasha Davenport)

Just Tech has numerous openings. (JT) (h/t Legal Tech Jobs)

Harvard’s Social and Historical Perspectives on Calculation in the Law symposium is accepting abstracts. (HU)

The International Symposium has a call for papers on governing AI, legal and regulatory responses. (IS)

The Judicial Innovation Fellowship is looking for fellows. (JIF)

JusticeText needs a marketing lead. (JT) (h/t Devshi Mehrotra)

[New] MacArthur Foundation needs a program officer focused on public interest tech. (MF) (h/t Keith Porcaro)

Measures for Justice needs a comms director. (MfJ)

[New] North Carolina Legal Aid needs a chief innovation officer. (NCLA) (h/t Kieth Porcaro)

Northeastern University needs an AI and social justice prof. (NU)

The Philly District Attorney's Office is looking to fill a number of roles. (PDAO) (h/t Oren Gur)

[New] The Policing Project has multiple openings. (PP) (h/t Kaylynn Lopez)

[New] Rejis needs an executive director. (R) (h/t Anjali Fernandes)

SimpleCitizen, an immigration tech company, has engineering, product and sales roles. (SC) (h/t Eleni Manis)

[New] Stanford University needs a civil justice and innovation fellow. (SU)

Surveillance Resistance Lab needs a senior research fellow. (SRL) (h/t Rebecca Williams)

The Tech Talent Project is hiring for multiple roles. (TTP)

Theory and Principle, a legal software development boutique, is hiring. (T&P)

UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project seeks Research Director. (UCLA)