Law and Computing Concentration
Artificial intelligence has entered society at a lightning pace. Industries—including law—are moving quickly to determine how to best educate and apply AI to keep pace with rapidly emerging technologies.
At the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University, our newly developed Law and Computing Concentration harnesses the power of modern computing to improve the legal profession and increase access to justice. Adding to the modern lawyer’s repertoire, we teach programming as a modern lawyer may need to use it. Students learn how to think like a computer scientist and a lawyer, to understand government regulation of modern technology, and possibly enter the rapidly emerging field of legal software design.
All the computer programming classes in this concentration offered in our law school are taught by lawyers who learned to code after they were admitted to the bar. The courses will allow you to discover skills you did not realize you had and potential career paths that probably never occurred to you in an environment where your background in something other than science, technology, engineering, or math is welcomed.
Unique and Elite
Duquesne Kline School of Law is unique among American law schools in offering a law and computing concentration. We are among a handful of schools teaching a computer programming course for lawyers, and part of a smaller group of schools teaching multiple courses on computer programming for law students who began their legal education without coding experience.
Our efforts have earned university-wide honors. The instructors of the Coding for Lawyers class were recognized with one of two Creative Teaching Awards given across the entire university in 2023. That same year, integration of coding into the work of our legal clinics led to our clinical director receiving the University’s inaugural Creator-Innovator Award and funding from the American Bar Foundation.
Courses
To qualify for the concentration, students must take four courses from our law and technology curriculum that involve hands-on programming to solve legal problems.
This course examines issues faced by society with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and considers the role of administrative agencies in regulating this technology.
This course introduces students to the Python programming language in which students identify and implement automated processes that are helpful to lawyers or provide legal information to those otherwise unable to obtain it.
Students who have taken Coding for Lawyers have the background to do a deeper dive into programming through Duquesne’s computer science department to prepare them for careers in legal software design. Our introductory Coding course provides students for this next class in a typical undergraduate degree in computer science, which students in this Law and Computing concentration have successfully completed. Students are eligible to take this course as well as more advanced courses that then required Data Structures as a pre-requisite.
Electronic discovery has revolutionized civil litigation with the work of combing through millions of documents now being a collaboration between legal technology companies and law firms. Duquesne Kline School of Law is one of only a handful of law schools to teach students to actually use this technology to identify documents relevant to complex litigation.
This course surveys the basis of U.S. intellectual property law, including patents, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets.
This is a skills-based course that introduces students to the technologies needed to run a law office, including operating systems, communications software, document preparation, and collaboration and document management systems.
In this course, students design legal-tech solutions for governmental entities and public interest legal organizations. In its first year, the focus will be on creating a scheduling system for multiple divisions of the Allegheny County juvenile court to minimize the burden of appearance on litigants, lawyers, witnesses, and court personnel.
Large language models, like GPT-Chat and Google’s Gemini, have greatly expanded the potential of computers to aid lawyers – and anyone needing access to legal information. This course teaches students how large language models work and use natural language processing to build tools with these models.
This course introduces students to the basic principles of patent law in the United States, including considerations of the subject matters that are eligible for patent protection, the conditions for patentability of an invention, and the disclosure requirements for a patent application.
Students work with big data in this course to create a predictive model and, once built, limitations and biases in the data are analyzed to determine how problematic predictions are being made.
Legal Tech and Data Science Competitions
We have provided travel support for students who are interested in national competitions at the intersection of law, data science and computer science every year of the program's existence. Students have competed in elite competitions, such as the Duke Future Contracts Competition, Georgia Tech Hackalytics 2024, and the Hofstra National Legal Innovation Tournament. Our students have also placed first at the Brooklyn Law School Center for Urban Entrepreneurship Innovators’ Invitations and the Duquesne University-Wide Data for Making a Difference Hackathon.
Alumni Testimonials
"Because the concentration courses were so different than traditional law classes, it truly helped add a hands-on and engaging component to the curriculum that simply does not appear in other courses, and my education was enriched for it. I would recommend taking one of the introductory curriculum courses to anyone, new or familiar with coding, and further encourage pursuing the Law and Computing Concentration if you find you enjoy that introductory course." - Joe Pisano, L'24
"Personally, I had no background in computer science. It was something I had always wanted to learn more about, and coding for lawyers allowed me to expand my toolbelt while still studying law. I left that course with a strong foundation of how to use and discuss language-based systems like Python." - Ryan McEntire, L'24
"These classes offer a collaborative, encouraging sandbox environment where students can take issues they have learned through law school and make tools that can help better the legal field." - Morgan Barker, L'24
Faculty
These Duquesne Kline School of Law faculty intersect law and technology in courses in our Law and Computing concentration.
April M. Barton
Dean and Professor of Law
Joseph Decker
Adjunct Faculty
Morgan Gray
Adjunct Faculty
Jacqueline Lipton
Associate Professor, Carol Los Mansmann Chair in Faculty Scholarship
Katherine Norton
Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship, Director of Clinical and International Programs and Associate Professor of Law
Wesley M. Oliver
Director of the Criminal Justice Program and Professor of Law
Tara L. Willke
Associate Dean for Strategic Academic Programs and Associate Professor of Law
Research and Engagement
The Duquesne Kline faculty is actively engaged in the local, national, and international law and technology communities.
Computer Science and Law
Computationally Assessing Suspicion, 92 Univ. of Cincinnati Law Review 1108 (2024) (Profs Gray and Oliver, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley).
Empirical Legal Analysis Simplified: Reducing Complexity through Automatic Identification of Legally Relevant Factors, 382 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 2270 (2024) (Profs Gray and Oliver, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley).
Can GPT Alleviate the Burden of Annotation?, Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Dec. 2023) (Profs
Gray and Oliver, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley).
GPT4 Support Analysis of Textual Data in Tasks Requiring Highly Specialized Domain
Expertise? Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Automated Semantic Analysis of Information
in Legal Text (ASAIL 2023) (Prof. Gray, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley, Hannes
Westermann, and Huihui Xu, Can).
Explaining Legal Concepts with Augmented Large Language Models (GPT-4). Proceedings of the Workshop on AI for Legislation (AI4Legs 2023) (Prof. Gray, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley, Hannes Westermann, and Huihui Xu).
Automatic Identification and Empirical Analysis of Legally Relevant Factors, Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (June 2023) (Profs Gray and Oliver, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley).
Toward Automatically Identifying Legally Relevant Factors, Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Dec. 2022) (Profs Gray and Oliver, with Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley).
Identifying the Factors of Suspicion, Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Dec. 2020) (Profs Gray and Oliver with Arthur Crivella).
Transformers for Classifying Fourth Amendment Factors and Elements Tests, Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Dec. 2020) (Prof.
Oliver with Evan Gretok and David Langerman).
Reducing Subjectivity and Bias in an Officer’s Analysis of Suspicion in Drug Interdiction
Stops, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (June 2019) (Profs Gray
and Oliver, with Arthur Crivella).
Coding Suspicion, Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2018) (Profs. Gray and Oliver, with Arthur Crivella and Morgan Gray).
Technology and Access to Justice
The Automated Legal Clinic: Family Division, Appellate Section, 7 Journal of Law and Technology at Texas (forthcoming 2024) (Profs. Norton, Gray, and Oliver).
Accessing Justice in Hybrid Courts: Addressing the Needs of Low-Income Litigants in
Blended in-Person and Virtual Proceedings, 30 Georgetown Journal on Poverty L. & Policy 499 (2023) (Prof. Norton)
Avoiding the Great Divide: Assuring Court Technology Lightens the Load of Low-Income
Litigants Post-COVID-19, 88 Tennessee Law Review 771 (2021) (Prof. Norton)
The Middle Ground: A Meaningful Balance Between the Benefits and Limitations of Artificial
Intelligence to Assist with the Justice Gap, 75 University of Miami L. Review 190 (2020) (Prof. Norton)
Mind the Gap: Technology as a Lifeline for Pro Se Child Custody Appeals, 58 Duquesne Law Review 82 (2020) (Prof. Norton)
Technology, Ethics and Policy
Application of Cascade Theory to Online Systems: A Study of Email and Google Cascades, 10 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology 473 (2009) (Dean Barton)
Norm Origin and Development in Cyberspace: Models of Cybernorm Evolution, 78 Washington University Law Quarterly 59 (2000) (Dean Barton)
Internet Red Light Districts: Domain Name Proposal for Regulatory Zoning of Obscene Content, John Marshall Journal of Computer and Information Law 21 (1997) (Dean Barton)
Technology in Legal Education
Best Practices for Building a High-Tech Law School (ABA 2012) (Dean Barton)
Computer Science and Law
“Automatic Annotation of Factors”, Thirty-Sixth International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands (December 2023) (Prof. Gray)
“Computationally Assessing Reasonable Suspicion in Drug Interdiction Stops,” Conference on Data Science and Law (co-sponsored by Fordham Law School, University of Virginia School of Law, ETH Zurich), New York, NY, July 31, 2023. (Prof. Oliver)
“Automatic Identification of Factors”, Thirty-Fifth International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany (December 2022) (Prof. Gray)
“The Computational Anatomy of a Drug Interdiction Stop,” Information Society Project, Yale Law School, October 19, 2021. (Profs. Oliver and Gray)
“Identifying the Factors of Suspicion,” Thirty-Third International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, December 2020 (online) (Prof. Gray)
“Transformers for Classification of Bright-Line vs. Totality-of-the-Circumstances Rule in Fourth Amendment Cases,” Thirty-Third International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, December 2020 (online) (Prof. Oliver)
“Reducing Subjectivity and Bias in an Officer’s Analysis of Suspicion in Drug Interdiction Stops,” Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Montreal, Quebec, June 18, 2019. (Prof. Oliver)
Technology and Access to Justice
“Clinical Perspectives on Developing AI to Improve Access to Justice,” Georgia State University Law Review Symposium AI & the Law: Practice, Ethics & Access. Atlanta, Georgia (March 22, 2024). (Profs. Norton and Oliver)
“Collaborating to Bridge the Justice Gap with Legal Technology,” American Bar Association Tech Show, Chicago, IL, February 15, 2024 (Prof. Oliver)
“Intelligent Practice: How Firms & Institutions Are Adapting to Emerging Technologies,” Georgia State University Law Review Symposium AI & the Law: Practice, Ethics & Access. Atlanta, Georgia (March 22, 2024) (Prof. Norton)
“Technology and Pro Bono Appeals: An Allegheny Co. Pilot Program Aims to Bring Greater Access to Pro Se Custody Appeals.” Law in The Family (Podcast), Pennsylvania Bar Association (December 2022) Episode 22 (Prof. Gray)
“Empowering Parties through Artificial Intelligence,” ACT (Autonomy Through Cyberjustice Technologies) International Midterm Conference: Empowering Litigants while Disempowering Abuse, held at the Cyberjustice Lab of the University of Montreal (October 2022) (Prof. Norton)
“Artificial Intelligence as a Path to Closing the Justice Gap,” 2019 Artificial Intelligence and the Law Conference, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Prof. Norton)
“Electronic Civil Gideon,” 2019 Three Rivers Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh, School of Law, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Prof. Norton)
Technology, Ethics and Policy
“How Can We Create an Ethical World with Generative AI? Closing Plenary, Generative AI and the Future of Policy,” Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law (November 2023). (Dean Barton)
“AI & The Future of Democracy: Ethics, Law & Policy,” Thomas R. Kline Center for Judicial Education, (April 10, 2024) (Dean Barton)
Technology in Legal Education
“Python for Lawyers,” Teaching Python (Podcast), July 8, 2024
“Computer Programming in Doctrinal and Clinical Courses,” CALIcon Conference, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (June 14, 2024) (Profs. Norton and Oliver)
“Introduction to Python for Lawyers,” PyCON US 2024, May 16, 2024 (Profs. Gray and Oliver)
“Writing code with law students”, Talking Legal Ed (Podcast), Linda Jellum, Billie Jo Kaufman, David T. Ritchie (April 2023) (Profs Gray and Oliver).
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Wesley M. Oliver