Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers

Prerequisites: None. This course is designed for students with and without prior programming experience.

Exam Type: No Exam

This course is a variant of Harvard College’s introduction to computer science, CS50, designed especially for law students, with additional emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLMs), and other emerging technologies. Whereas CS50 itself takes a bottom-up approach, emphasizing mastery of low-level concepts and implementation details thereof, this course takes a top-down approach, emphasizing mastery of high-level concepts and design decisions related thereto. Ultimately, it equips students with a deeper understanding of the legal implications of technological decisions made by clients.

Through a mix of technical instruction and discussion, this course empowers students to be informed contributors to technology-driven conversations. In addition, it prepares students to formulate technology-informed legal arguments and opinions. Along the way, it equips students with hands-on experience with: Python and SQL, languages via which they can mine data for answers themselves; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, languages with which web and mobile applications are built; and generative AI, which is already disrupting the same.

Topics also include algorithms, cloud computing, databases, networking, privacy, programming, scalability, security, and more, with a particular emphasis on understanding how the work that engineers do and the technological solutions that they employ can ultimately impact clients. Students emerge from this course with first-hand appreciation of how it all works and all the more confident in the factors that should guide their decision-making.

This course is designed for future attorneys who expect to work closely with and advise decision-makers on legal matters that impact or intersect with technology.

See cs50.harvard.edu/hls for course’s website.