Our quest to build better, fairer courts is missing a critical ingredient: open API standards for court management systems, along with procurement requirements that mandate interoperability and prevent courts from being locked in to a specific software vendor. A looming Supreme Court ruling in Oracle v. Google could make risks…

UPDATE: You can try the simulation now at https://detainrelease.com To date, the debate surrounding pretrial algorithmic risk assessment tools has focused on statistical quality and overall legality. In 2017, when Jason Tashea and I first taught our Georgetown Law students about risk assessments, our lesson summarized those debates in a…

“What makes something simple or complex? It’s not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.” —Don Norman, “Living with Complexity” “To define is to limit.” —Oscar Wilde, “The Picture…

Nonprofits serve the public interest. When they go under, their assets can be lost. Trusts can preserve public goods and protect them from the abyss of bankruptcy. — Last month, a trove of publicly-funded cancer research at The Center of Cancer Systems Biology was lost after the Center’s nonprofit fiduciary, Genesys Research Institute (GRI), collapsed into bankruptcy. Like many stories that go this way, the end came suddenly, then slowly: GRI closed the Center in September 2014, filed…

It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way. — John von Neumann, “The Mathematician” A person is not a…

This post was originally published in the fall of 2014. Ello has gathered a fair amount of attention (if not actual market share) on the back of promises to never sell user data in order to raise revenue. Partially in response to worries over the company’s acceptance of VC money…