Foreword

The use of data science in law has gone a long way with the recent industrial revolutions of digital technology and Artificial Intelligence. This book discusses these developments and sheds light on their positive and negative implications and potential. The book discusses these future directions in three parts: (1) using data to improve legal decision-making, (2) governing the legal use of data, and (3) the forensic use of genetic data.

The book begins with novel methods whereby data is being used in legal decision-making, examining some of the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are handling data to improve the legal system itself. The chapters in this section focus on the ways in which data can be used to improve legal decision-making – and thus to improve access to justice, to better justify decisions, to reduce biases in decision-making, and to evaluate evidence to reduce miscarriages of justice.

The second part of the book, governing the legal use of data, discusses how new strategies are required to deal with the technological advances in this field. The chapters in this section focus on eliminating the use of false legal information hallucinated by AI systems, identifying and addressing cognitive biases among forensic scientists, and regulating the forensic use of bioinformatics in the criminal justice system.

The third and last part of the book, the exploration of the forensic use of genetic data, explores some of the most significant advances that have been made in the field of bioinformatics and its application to human identification. The chapters in this section focus on these developments, examining how advances in SNP sequencing, combined with computational methods for kinship identification, are leading to the clearance of previously unsolvable cases.

Data science and law have always been intertwined. Nonetheless, outstanding recent advances in data science, and especially the technologies that underpin it, have made this interconnection a powerful and often contentious paradigm. This book is an innovative, comprehensive, and future-facing scholarly work that aims to explore the benefits, as well as the hazards, coupled within this novel nexus.