Discrimination, AI & the Criminal Justice System
Join us for a panel discussion with Vincent Southerland (Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, NYU Law), Yuan Stevens (International Centre for Comparative Criminology, UdM) and Fahad Diwan (Smartbail) on the use of AI within the criminal justice system and its potential for abuse/discrimination.
Hosted by McGill AI & Law.
About the speakers
Vincent M. Southerland joined the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law as its inaugural Executive Director in February 2017. He has dedicated his career to advancing racial justice and civil rights. Vincent comes to NYU Law after serving as an Assistant Federal Public Defender with the Federal Defenders for the Southern District of New York since 2015. Prior to his time at the Federal Defenders, Vincent spent seven years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), where he was a Senior Counsel. While at LDF, he engaged in litigation and advocacy at the intersection of race and criminal justice, including the successful representation of death-sentenced prisoners across the American South and juveniles sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. He also led LDF’s advocacy efforts around race and policing, and was lead counsel in school desegregation and employment discrimination matters. Vincent previously served as a staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders, and an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. He began his career as a law clerk to the Honorable Theodore McKee, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and the Honorable Louis H. Pollak, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Vincent holds an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center, received his JD from Temple University School of Law and his BA from the University of Connecticut.
Yuan Stevens, BCL/LLB'18, is passionate about patching up and assessing vulnerabilities in our socio-technical systems. She is a lawyer to-be and researcher working at the intersections of public interest hacking and emerging technology. She is a published author and is routinely asked to speak on topics ranging from the history of hacking laws to the ethics of scraping data. Yuan is currently research manager and project lead at the International Centre for Comparative Criminology (University of Montreal) and researcher for hacker expert Gabriella Coleman (McGill University). She serves on the board of directors for Open Privacy Research Institute, Head & Hands in Montreal, and previously worked at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Fahad Diwan, BCL'17, loved criminal law during his legal studies, but decided to article at a big corporate law firm for reasons still unknown to him. Fahad decided to jump ship to criminal law after, but he did not like how the system worked. Now, he creates technologies to improve the criminal justice system. He is currently developing SmartBail. SmartBail uses artificial intelligence to predict whether defendants released on bail are likely to commit crimes or show up for their hearings. Its mission is to make the bail system fairer for all Canadians.
About McGill AI & Law
You wonder about natural language processing and its use in white-collar crime investigations? About data harvesting and surveillance? About judges relying on decision tools powered by algorithms? About robots giving legal advice? Look no further!
The Montreal Cyberjustice Laboratory, the McGill Private Justice and the Rule of Law Research Group and the McGill student tech law collective are launching a new speaker series on AI and the law, which seeks to discuss and debate legal tech developments.
