Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University Professor Wesley Oliver and adjunct faculty member Morgan Gray, L’19, attended the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law in Braga, Portugal, at the University of Minho on June 20. Gray presented a paper entitled "Automatic Identification and Empirical Analysis of Legally Relevant Factors." He presented for the team, which, along with Oliver, included Kevin Ashley, Professor of Law and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, and Jaromir Savelka, who is a Postdoc in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law is the world's leading conference on AI and Law and is held only every other year. Gray’s paper was part of two additional papers at the conference. All the papers appeared in the published "Proceedings" of the conference.
Oliver presented for the team of Gray, Ashley, and Savelka, with a paper entitled "Computationally Assessing Reasonable Suspicion in Drug Interdiction Stops" at the Law and Data Science Conference in New York City July 31- August 1. That conference is co-hosted by Fordham Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and ETH Zurich. They will be seeking to publish that paper in an American law journal this fall.
The presentations and papers are the result of the team’s current research, which involves creating a way to computationally read 40,000 U.S. court decisions that evaluated whether officers had reasonable suspicion to detain a car stopped for an ordinary traffic stop until a drug dog confirmed or dispelled the officer's suspicion that the motorist was a trafficker.
Oliver and Gray additionally received accolades for their related AI work this past spring. They were recognized with Duquesne University’s Creative Teaching Award for their project, "The Development and First Offering of Coding for Lawyers Course.” Oliver also was honored with the Duquesne Kline School of Law’s “Innovation in Teaching Award” at the 2023 Commencement. The award-winning “Coding for Lawyers” is a cutting-edge course offered to Duquesne Kline School of Law students. Duquesne Kline students who have taken the course are among an elite group of students in law schools; there are only three other law schools nationally where a similar course is taught.
In the Spring 2024 semester, Duquesne Kline will add to the computational law curriculum with a second programming class entitled “Statistics and Machine Learning for Lawyers.”
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