PICTURED ABOVE: Professor Brandon Garrett, L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, delivers a presentation on Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which governs the admissibility of expert testimony.
Federal judges from across the United States attended a multi-day course at Duke University designed to help judges understand and anticipate new ways technology will impact the legal profession. The program, “Law and Technology for Judges,” was co-hosted by the Bolch Judicial Institute and the Federal Judicial Center in September 2024.
The program built upon themes from the first delivery of the course in 2019 at Duke Law School. Like that course, attendees participated in three days of lectures on artificial intelligence, cyber security, data privacy, technology and criminal justice issues, fintech, and blockchain, and examined the impact these topics and related technologies will have on the judiciary.
The 2024 course addressed the following panels/topics:
- Introduction to Law and Technology and Key Evidentiary Issues
- Primer on Statistics in Law and Forensic Evidence
- Forensics and Rule 702 in the Courtroom
- Law, Technology, and Cognitive Liberty
- Primer on Artificial Intelligence
- Technology and Fourth Amendment Searches
- AI Applications and Interpretability in Judicial Decision-Making
- Artificial Intelligence Regulation and Governance
- Access to Justice
- ESI Technology & Electronic Evidence in Discovery
- Generative AI and Deepfakes
- Rules and Orders: Establishing Control Over the Use of AI in Court
- Cybersecurity: Threats and Vulnerabilities of Judges and Courts
- Emerging Tools in the Legal Research
- Introduction to Blockchain and Digital Wallets
Linda Jeng, an expert on blockchain and “fintech” (financial technology) who presented the last session on digital wallets, remarked that this was a unique opportunity for both presenters and attendees to discuss pressing issues of technology.
“What a privilege to spend the past few days with US district and appellate court judges who are grappling with the latest legal issues raised by emerging technologies,” she wrote on LinkedIn following the conference. “We covered topics from #AI to data forensics, ending with our session on blockchain and digital assets.”
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