Unlike traditional academic programs, the Digital Scholars Program allowed participants to design their own research, pairing them with mentors from tech companies like Two Sigma, Datadog, and Spotify, as well as legal and policy institutions such as the U.S. House of Representatives.
In its inaugural year, scholars tackled a wide range of topics. Some used quantitative methods to analyze algorithmic bias, model police reform effectiveness, or study public engagement with legal articles. Others pursued qualitative research on data governance, AI in healthcare, and the media’s role in shaping public support for LGBTQ+ rights.
By 2021, the program expanded its focus to four key challenge areas: improving access to justice through technology, balancing innovation with privacy in big data, regulating lethal autonomous weapons, and leveraging law and technology for sustainability. Selected scholars—including a Harvard-bound student studying COVID-19 location tracking and a trio analyzing AI-enabled medical devices in India—worked over the summer with mentors to refine their research. Their projects ranged from comparative legal studies to data-driven policy frameworks, all aimed at addressing real-world gaps in law and technology.
From Theory to Practice: How Scholars Are Redefining Legal Research
One of the program’s defining features is its emphasis on actionable outcomes. Unlike traditional academic research, Digital Scholars projects often result in published analyses, interactive tools, or policy recommendations. For example, a 2020 scholar used natural language processing to map how public sentiment toward medical marijuana shifted during the opioid crisis, while another built a timeline tool to help readers handle complex legal topics like net neutrality or antitrust law. These projects don’t just explore legal questions—they reimagine how legal knowledge is shared and consumed.
A team studying Supreme Court coverage combined JURIST’s archives with sentiment analysis to track how media framing influences public perception, while another developed an agent-based model to simulate police reform trends. These efforts reflect a broader shift: legal scholarship is increasingly data-driven, and technology is no longer an afterthought but a core tool for solving societal problems.
JURIST Digital Scholars Speaker Series: Public Events on Law, Technology, and Policy
Episode One launched on July 14, 2020 with three recent graduates discussing how they handled law-technology intersections in graduate school. Shili Shao, Rebecca Weires, and King Xia each described their editorial leadership of law-tech journals, academic specializations, and prior work with courts, privacy organizations, and major law firms. Episode Two featured Dr. Anna Hoffman, an assistant professor studying data, technology, culture, and ethics, and Eduardo Gonzales, who created an interactive video game to explain court processes for self-represented defendants. Episode Three highlighted Dr. Deen Freelon’s research on digital political expression and data-science methods, and Cierra Robson’s work on technology’s impact on the American racial order.
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Episode Four presented Jennifer Shin, who founded a data-science consulting firm, teaches at NYU Stern, and holds product roles in media and cryptocurrency companies. Episode Five focused on antitrust implications of big-tech growth, featuring Dr. Joshua Wright, former FTC commissioner and global antitrust institute director, and Dr. Fiona Scott Morton, Yale professor specializing in industrial organization and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics.
A Glimpse at the 2021 Cohort
Jessie (Ziyu) Lin, now at Harvard Law, investigated how countries use location data tracking to combat COVID-19, comparing centralized approaches in Asia with decentralized models in Europe and the U.S. Her work examines legal barriers to data use, privacy risks under GDPR, and the constitutional implications of surveillance during pandemics.
Meanwhile, Madhur Bhatt, Lithin Mathew Thomas, and Viraj Aditya teamed up to design a legal framework for AI-enabled medical devices in India. Their project, comparing policies in the U.S., China, and South Korea, aims to balance economic growth with privacy protections, particularly in rural healthcare access. They’re developing a questionnaire to benchmark global best practices, ensuring their recommendations can be adapted by policymakers.
Among the standout outputs was Everest Fang’s examination of antitrust enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic, which appeared in JURIST in April 2021. His work analyzed how market consolidation in industries like airlines and pharmaceuticals was exacerbated by the crisis, while also tracking shifts in public attention toward competition law through readership data. Fang’s subsequent articles, including pieces on airline bailouts and the TikTok controversy, highlighted the program’s ability to connect academic inquiry with timely policy debates.
Other scholars translated their research into practical applications. Michael Chau developed an interactive timeline tool that organizes JURIST articles by subtopics, such as FCC regulations on robocalls or net neutrality, allowing readers to handle complex legal histories visually. His project, documented on Medium, addressed a common frustration: the difficulty of synthesizing scattered legal news into coherent narratives. Similarly, Alex Chen built an agent-based model to simulate police reform trends, a methodology rarely applied in legal scholarship. His framework, published in the JDS 2020 cohort series, demonstrated how computational social science could expose systemic biases in law enforcement without relying solely on qualitative case studies.
Philos Kim took a technical approach to bias detection, designing deep-learning models to classify sentiment in legal news articles. Using Captum, a library for interpreting neural networks, he visualized how ideological and demographic biases manifested in AI-generated analyses. Kim’s findings, shared in a Python library he created, were intended to lower the barrier for non-technical researchers to assess algorithmic fairness. Meanwhile, Agasha Ratam quantified the relationship between readability and public engagement by analyzing JURIST’s archives. His project, hosted on GitHub, proposed a metric to predict article accessibility based on user metrics like time spent on page, offering actionable insights for legal writers aiming to broaden their audience.
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