CS50 for Lawyers
online-learning.harvard.edu
CS50 for Lawyers
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#2This looks great, thank you.
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#3This looks great, thank you.
No problem, my friend who studies law has just started it and is finding it super interesting.
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#4It's incredible that this material is being provided for free, and I hope that law firms far and wide encourage their associates and partners alike to update their knowledge with this. Understanding which parties and systems touch, transform, and transmit data is central to practically every legal matter in modern times, and standard intro-to-CS coursework is neither sufficient nor fully necessary for legal experts to know the right questions to ask domain experts. The clarity this brings will be a huge benefit to society.
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#5It's unclear how this course applies or is customized specifically for lawyers. There would be a much clearer value proposition for lawyers if it was summarized in a way like - learn how to build APIs - examining the key claims and decisions from the Oracle v. Google Java API case. As advertised, it seems like a regular CS overview course. They're definitely on to something, it seems like a class to help attorneys better understand key concepts of programming to be better attorneys, rather than a transition from the law to programming career. If that's the case, they need to do a better job advertising how each bullet point will help them become better attorneys.
It also might have more credibility if they had an instructor who was an attorney.
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#6It's unclear how this course applies or is customized specifically for lawyers. There would be a much clearer value proposition for lawyers if it was summarized in a way like - learn how to build APIs - examining the key claims and decisions from the Oracle v. Google Java API case. As advertised, it seems like a regular CS overview course. They're definitely on to something, it seems like a class to help attorneys be…
It's unclear how this course applies or is customized specifically for lawyers
My wife (lawyer) did the first three classes and the first two assignments. I watched along and was waiting for the same thing. She had some fun doing binary and playing around in scratch, and quickly lost interest as we didn't see where the legal part came in. We assumed it was the same course all the other CS50 variants were following and maybe there would be a legal bit at the end.
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#7This is not only much needed, but also will help shape how our legal system can adapt to new technologies.
I had the privilege of sitting in on an Election Law class last year at YLS. The topic was gerrymandering, with a discussion of the legal arguments presented in Vieth v. Jubelirer.
For non-lawyers, the plaintiffs arguments for what should constitute illegal gerrymandering is technically complex, using statistic concepts, graphs (computer science), and even np-completeness. In essence, the argument was to use computers to draw all possible congressional districts, score them on the basis of discarded votes, and if the scoring of the drawn districts is greater than two standard deviations from the mean district, determine it is unfairly drawn. I found particularly striking an audio recording the professor shared of a lawyer struggling to answer John Robert's questions on technical topics. The professor used this as an example to be prepared to answer questions that you may not have a background in, even if the expert witnesses had already explained the concepts. Unfortunately, the court rejected the proposed determination of unfair gerrymandering in a 5-4 decision, with the dissent stating that the presented way to determine unfair gerrymandering was clever, correct, and should be revisited.
As we continue to push the frontiers of what we can do with computers, we need informed lawyers who can clearly present deep technical topics, and we need judges who are capable of understanding them.
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#8I wish that more schools offered "X for Y" classes to foster basic literacy in relevant areas of study. I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers" or "Architecture for Game Designers".
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#9I wish that more schools offered "X for Y" classes to foster basic literacy in relevant areas of study. I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers" or "Architecture for Game Designers".
> I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers"
Don't all game programming courses already include extensive maths classes?
Re: CS50 for Lawyers
#10I wish that more schools offered "X for Y" classes to foster basic literacy in relevant areas of study. I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers" or "Architecture for Game Designers".
> I'd love a "Math for {Game,Control System} Programmers" Don't all game programming courses already include extensive maths classes?
Curriculums? In my experience yes. Unfortunately connecting those classes to the things you're going to be doing is usually an exercise left to the reader.
It's usually "here's some linear algebra and calc" but not "this thing you're doing here comes from this model and here's how we got here"