Introduction to the Legal Studies Modules

LEGALST 190: Data, Prediction, and Law

Course Description: Data, Prediction, and Law is a new Legal Studies seminar that allows students to explore different data sources that scholars and government officials use to make generalizations and predictions in the realm of law. The course also introduces critiques of predictive techniques in law. Students apply the statistical and Python programming skills from Foundations of Data Science (Data 8) to examine a traditional social science dataset, “big data” related to law, and legal text data.

Module Description: This module introduces exploratory data analysis as a lab within a semester-long data-enabled course. Using data from 2016 US presidential campaign speeches, module students mine features from speech text, create visualizations for data exploration, and apply principal component analysis to their extracted features. The module concludes with an example of a 3-dimensional feature plot. The course is designed for students with Data-8 or equivalent experience.