JT/DL: Welcome to the Bardo
We'll get through it together
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
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)
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)