Data Dimensions: Using Large Language Models to Understand Courts as Policymakers

Join host Chris Kromphardt, Assistant Program Director for the MS in Data Analytics and Policy Program, as he welcomes Doug Rice, Associate Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for a discussion on Large Language Models.

Rice will explore the utility and early applications of LLMs in law and courts research, focusing on how researchers can bridge the gap between technical tools and substantive legal inquiry.

LLMs, like ChatGPT, have inspired newspaper headlines, student imaginations, and faculty anxiety. However, while the frontiers of language modeling have rapidly expanded, research on law and courts, which often involves studying texts, has mostly lagged behind. Given this gap, computer scientists—eager for new spaces to deploy their models—have begun to occupy spaces more traditionally filled by social scientists and legal scholars, but with markedly different goals. Computer science and natural language processing researchers generally are interested in developing tools (for example, those that optimize classification and categorization, conduct machine translation, or complete phrases), while law and court researchers more frequently want to build evidence to address and answer complex, substantive research questions.

Doug Rice is Associate Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies in the Department of Political Science at UMass Amherst, where he is also a core faculty member in the Data Analytics & Computational Social Program as well as a faculty affiliate of the Computational Social Science Institute.