LSA 2 nd Half Century Project Essay. Sociolegal Studies in the Big Data Age

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1 LSA 2 nd Half Century Project Essay Sociolegal Studies in the Big Data Age Karen E.C. Levy PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Princeton University kelevy@princeton.edu levy.net Abstract: The age of big data is upon us. Big data poses a paradigm shift for law and society both in terms of substantive effects on sociolegal institutions, and possibilities for new types of scholarship. I outline steps for LSA s critical engagement with big data as we enter the next half century.

2 Sociolegal Studies in the Big Data Age Karen E.C. Levy Princeton University The age of big data is upon us. Institutions of all sorts are being reshaped by the technological watershed of ubiquitous data collection and analytics from health care to higher education, from regulatory governance to social relationships. The rise of big data offers us exciting, fundamentally new ways to understand human behavior. At the same time, it raises a multitude of novel social and ethical questions about the operation of law in social life. Looking ahead to the next fifty years, no other phenomenon has more potential to create a true paradigm shift in law and society both in terms of its substantive effects on sociolegal institutions, and the possibilities it creates for new types of sociolegal scholarship. Universities and funding bodies across the disciplinary spectrum are beginning to explore the frontier of big data as it relates to their own work: consider, for instance, the rise of the field of digital humanities, 1 the National Science Foundation s Big Data Research Initiative, 2 and a new major inter university partnership to foster data science across disciplines. 3 As an inherently interdisciplinary organization, LSA should be at the forefront of this development by encouraging the sociolegal community to engage critically and creatively with the big data turn. Sociolegal scholarship has much to gain from engaging with big data, and several promising projects have already begun to demonstrate its potential. Data driven approaches can be harnessed to understand sociolegal dynamics in new ways, and to create new tools that can strengthen the empirical basis of our study. For instance, the Comparative Constitutions Project, 4 based at the University of Texas and backed by Google, creates a searchable, systematically comparable database of text from global and historical constitutions. The Sunlight Foundation 5 has produced a wide range of tools for tracking Congressional activity and tracing the political influence of financial 1 National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities website, 2 National Science Foundation, Big Data Research Initiative website, 3 Steve Lohr (2013) Program Seeks to Nurture Data Science Culture at Universities, New York Times Bits Blog, seeks to nurturedata science culture at universities/ 4 Comparative Constitutions Project, 5 Sunlight Foundation,

3 contributions. Recent research employs new text analysis methods to test theories about constitutional change 6 and to trace salient issues in regulatory rulemaking processes. 7 Other innovative studies use very large samples of social media data to study the predictability of political outcomes. 8 In addition to using big data tools and methods in our scholarship, sociolegal studies should critically consider how the big data moment is changing the meanings of governance, regulation, and enforcement. This endeavor will depend more heavily on new theoretical development and in depth qualitative studies, as well as explicit engagement with normative and ethical facets of data aggregation. Sociolegal scholars are beginning to engage with these issues, considering the relationship between big data and due process protections 9 and the tension between prediction and the presumption of innocence. 10 The explosion of personal data online creates many new legal risks, new concerns around privacy and intellectual property, and new types of harm. And the fact of data collection in itself is changing how law is experienced on the ground : policing practices are becoming increasingly data driven (though toward uncertain outcomes), 11 and fear of inter institution data sharing practices leads to wholesale disengagement among vulnerable populations like parolees, who avoid hospitals and steady employment to avoid being traceable through interconnected systems. 12 In the next half century, LSA should undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary effort to engage critically with the questions brought on by the big data paradigm its promises and pitfalls, the empirical opportunities it creates as well as the social and ethical hazards it poses. What steps should LSA take to harness the power of big data for 6 Daniel Taylor Young (2013) How Do You Measure a Constitutional Moment? Using Algorithmic Topic Modeling to Evaluate Bruce Ackerman s Theory of Constitutional Change, 122 Yale L.J Karen Levy and Michael Franklin (forthcoming) Driving Regulation: Using Topic Models to Examine Political Contention in the U.S. Trucking Industry, 31 Social Science Computer Rev.. 8 Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, Fabio Rojas (2013) More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior, 8 PLOS One Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz (forthcoming) Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms, 55 Boston College Law Rev.. 10 Ian Kerr and Jessica Earle (2013) Prediction, Preemption, Presumption: How Big Data Threatens Big Picture Privacy, 66 Stan. L. Rev. Online Michael Price (2013) National Security and Local Police, Brennan Center for Justice report, security local police 12 See Sarah Brayne (forthcoming) Surveillance and System Avoidance: Criminal Justice Contact and Institutional Attachment, Amer. Sociological Rev. ; Alice Goffman (2009) On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto, 74 Amer. Sociological Rev

4 sociolegal studies, and to create meaningful dialogue around its proliferation? I propose several concrete initiatives: Create a new Collaborative Research Network (CRN) focused on Big Data, Law, and Society. A new CRN can serve as a key resource for organizing an international community of sociolegal scholars working on big data related issues, in order to organize thematic sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting and facilitate communication around publication opportunities, conferences, and other happenings. Create an online clearinghouse for sociolegal data resources. A good deal of data that might be of use to sociolegal scholars is public, but diffuse. A central resource clearinghouse would be valuable for disseminating the data that is available to researchers. LSA could either host the data on its own servers or could simply provide a central website or wiki that links to resources elsewhere; perhaps such an effort could be undertaken in partnership with the American Association of Law Libraries. This resource could be of particular value to students. Consider creating a matchmaking service for cross disciplinary collaboration with data scientists. Creating infrastructures for effective collaboration across disciplines is essential for facilitating interdisciplinary research. Many of the most powerful contributions to be made in this burgeoning field will require the expertise of both sociolegal experts, and scholars adept with new methodologies for handling complex data but who may lack a concrete domain in which to deploy their skills. LSA can facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration by creating a matchmaking platform to bring these groups of people together. This effort could borrow from similar structures deployed in other contexts, like ProQuest s Pivot service (which catalogs funding and collaboration opportunities for academics) and DataKind (an organization that matches data scientists with NGOs for pro bono work). Explore synergies with leading academic centers for legal informatics. Entities like Stanford s new Center For Legal Informatics and Princeton s Center for Information Technology Policy have taken major strides toward digitizing legal data and putting it to new uses. Publicizing these endeavors to LSA s members (through special sessions at Annual Meetings or other collaborative efforts) would help to ensure that this data can be used by scholars to expand the body of sociolegal knowledge. Offer methodological tutorials or minicourses on big data at LSA Annual Meetings. These programs could expose participants to the fundamentals of data science methods (like open source statistical programming, or deriving data from free resources like Google s Ngram Viewer), or could be oriented

5 around standards for ethical research practices around big data collection and use. Devote a special issue of Law & Society Review to big data and sociolegal studies. This issue should map the state of the field as it emerges. It should contain exemplary empirical scholarship employing big data in sociolegal academic work. It should also critically and creatively address the role(s) of big data in changing legal and social structures. The big data frontier offers exciting new opportunities for scholarship, and also creates an essential need for critical reflection on the social changes it engenders. The Law and Society Association should be in the vanguard with respect to both of these facets as we enter the next half century of sociolegal studies. *** Karen E.C. Levy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. She has a JD from Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Her research focuses on intersections between technology, law, and social control.