Abstract:
Law has seldom been viewed as a complex system in the physical sense until computational law emerged to reflect on ontological, ethical and methodological debates over legal text as data. The judiciary system has embraced a surging datafication of court decisions; the legal profession has encountered the soaring demands for legal technology that predicts, secures and scrutinizes onsite and offsite dispute resolutions; and the academia has looked into the emergence of computational legal studies with data science. The article thus draws attention to a quick advent of computational law and its global educational landscape, thereby answering how a substantial toolkit of data science can inform the modern and next-generation legal education. The article aims to bridge the following gaps: First, it introduces the system of empirical research in social sciences and explores whether and how empirical methods can alleviate the controversy as mentioned earlier. Second, it explains how to build a legal research paradigm based on the “causal inference” endowed by computational intelligence, instead of “interpretation” and “correlation”. Third, it illustrates how to use the methods of computational social science (data capture, online experiments, network analysis, text mining and content analysis, spatial-time analysis, etc.) to derive micro-level metadata from the law as a social fact that characterizes the macroscopic whole. Finally, this article proposes a teaching framework of and a learning pathway towards computational law that will likely be a mainstream law-school course very shortly.
Speaker:
Dr. Wei Wang, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong
Wei Wang is now a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. Trained in Engineering and Law, he focuses his research interests on IP & IT Law, Innovation Policy, particularly by means of Computational Legal Studies and Data Science. He engages as an Administrative Officer for the Creative Commons Hong Kong Chapter, of which he was also among the founding members. Prior to his PhD studies, Wei worked as Data Analyst of IP litigations in Shenzhen and Research Associate with a focus on AI and Copyright at Law and Technology Centre, HKU. Wei recently completed the WIPO/QUT LLM in Intellectual Property with a Dean’s Scholarship. He also holds BEng, LLB and MPhil from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China), with the support of the Research Center for the Judicial Protection of Intellectual Property approved by the Supreme People’s Court of P.R.China. He has been an active speaker in the conferences organized by China Cyber & Information Law Society, WIPO and WTO. Wei is now a Member of the International Association of Artificial Intelligence and Law, Asian Privacy Scholars Network and Creative Commons Global Network.