Christopher Bavitz

An open letter to the Massachusetts Legislature from Chelsea Barabas, Christopher Bavitz, Ryan Budish, Karthik Dinakar, Cynthia Dwork, Urs Gasser, Kira Hessekiel, Joichi Ito, Ronald L. Rivest, Madars Virza, and Jonathan Zittrain. Dear Members of the Massachusetts Legislature: We write to you in our individual capacities¹ regarding the proposed introduction of actuarial risk assessment (“RA”) tools in the Commonwealth’s criminal justice system. As you are no doubt aware, Senate Bill 2185² — passed by the Massachusetts Senate on October 27, 2017 — mandates implementation of RA tools in the pretrial stage of criminal proceedings...As researchers with a strong interest in algorithms and fairness, we recognize that RA tools may have a place in the criminal justice system. In some cases, and by some measures, use of RA tools may promote outcomes better than the status quo. That said, we are concerned that the Senate Bill’s implementation of RA tools is cursory and does not fully address the complex and nuanced issues implicated by actuarial risk assessments.

An article by Christopher Bavitz. One track of the Berkman Klein Center’s work on artificial intelligence ethics and governance concerns the use of algorithms, machine learning, and related technologies in ways that impact social and criminal justice. Among other things, this research examines technologies employed by courts in their disposition of criminal cases. Increasingly, judicial determinations are informed by software that helps judges perform “risk assessments” of defendants or otherwise process and weigh factors relevant to decisions about sentencing, parole, and the like. The Center (along with collaborators at the MIT Media Lab) is undertaking a number of efforts to evaluate ways in which these kinds of technologies might mitigate or exacerbate bias.

...We may have helped create the AI monster here in the Hub, but it turns out we’re also the ones fighting to keep it on a leash, with a Justice League of passionate geeks working furiously to ensure the technology is used for the public good...Now [Bonnie] Docherty has turned her attention to another class of weapons that could endanger civilians—fully autonomous ones, powered by AI. She and a host of ethicists, advocates, and legal scholars worry about the possibility of a future in which wars involve robots that might have trouble discriminating between ordinary people and combatants—or be vulnerable to misuse by rogue regimes. “Fully autonomous weapons would face major obstacles in complying with existing international law,” Docherty explains, “and would cross a moral red line by making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield.”...[Chris] Bavitz, the managing director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, and his colleagues are assembling what they hope will be the definitive database of judicial risk-assessment products. “We are trying to create a one-stop-shopping resource,” Bavitz explains from his immaculate office overlooking Massachusetts Avenue. “Here are the products, here is what they purport to do, here are jurisdictions that use them, and here is the extent to which they make algorithms available for review.”

An op-ed by Nani Jansen Reventlow, Vivek Krishnamurthy and Christopher T. Bavitz. Imagine going online to do some research. You want to look up the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, read up on the recently deceased king of Thailand or learn about the Armenian genocide. You enter the search terms in your search engine of choice, and you get nothing. Zero results. This scenario might become reality if France’s highest court — the Council of State — rules against Google in a case that threatens to make anything on the Web that’s remotely controversial unsearchable. The case imperiling search as we know it stems from an order issued in 2014 by France’s data protection authority, CNIL. The order commands Google to remove 21 links from the results of a search on the name of a particular French citizen who asserted a “right to be forgotten.”

As Harvard Law School admissions officers finalize next year’s class, they do so with an eye toward a group of fields that deviate from the traditional path to legal studies: STEM. Law School chief admissions officer Jessica L. Soban said the percentage of admitted students with backgrounds in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—will remain in the double digits for the second year in a row, reflecting a deliberate effort by Law School admissions officers in recent years to increase the number of students with such backgrounds...Law School clinical professor Christopher T. Bavitz said he thinks students with STEM backgrounds possess skills well-suited to the law. “There are a lot of reasons why people with tech backgrounds can do well in the law,” he said. “A lot of law practice is explaining complicated concepts to people...and people with science and tech backgrounds do that well. I think they’re great analytical thinkers in ways that kind of map on to the thinking lawyers do.” The Law School has pioneered programs bridging science and the law. The school’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics—which was established a decade ago—was the first of its kind among law schools, according Faculty Director and Law professor I. Glenn Cohen, putting Harvard ahead of peer institutions.

A long-running effort led by Harvard law scholars to track material that disappears from the Internet is expanding with international partners. The project, now called Lumen, was launched in 2001 under the name Chilling Effects. It was a response to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law that allowed companies, governments, and people to request that Internet companies take down any material that was infringing on their copyright. By keeping a record of takedown requests, the site would “allow people to see what kinds of requests were being made, who was making them, what kind of content we were talking about,” said Christopher Bavitz, a co-director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society which hosts the project.

Perma.cc, a project that takes on the problem of “link rot” or broken or defunct links in scholarship, has won the prestigious Webby Award for best law site of 2015. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Perma.cc is a web archiving service that helps authors and publishers create permanent links to their online sources, which are preserved by participating libraries.

...Nearly 25 years after the first publicly viewable website appeared, the culture of sharing on the Internet is changing. Privacy and anonymity are crucial features of new social apps like Secret, Whisper and Canary. A growing number of websites also offer services that help protect, maintain or even erase what is fast becoming your most permanent and accessible record: data that can be gleaned about you from search engine results....“The options for getting facts and personal information removed once it’s been posted online in the U.S. are fairly limited,” says Christopher T. Bavitz, managing director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. “It’s very challenging to regulate the spread of this kind of information, but it’s challenging for very good reasons. The first good reason is the First Amendment.”