Seminars

Privacy Algorithms: Technical Implementations of Privacy Law

On 2025-01-09T10:00:00-05:00/2025-01-09T12:00:00-05:00, Langdell Hall South 272 Kirkland and Ellis Classroom, with Brave Mugisha

In an increasingly digital age, where the average internet user generates vast amounts of data every day, the challenge of ensuring privacy online has become more critical than ever, especially as user information is shared across large networks of companies and third parties. This seminar explores the intersection of privacy and technology, focusing on algorithms designed to protect personal data, such as “k-anonymity”, “l-diversity”, and “differential privacy”, while also examining their inherent limitations. Additionally, we will investigate the challenges of privacy law and regulatory legal frameworks in keeping pace with rapidly emerging frontier technologies.

Web Scraping 101 for Future Lawyers

On 2025-01-16T18:00:00-05:00/2025-01-16T20:00:00-05:00, Hauser Hall 102 Malkin Classroom, with Sedik Sadik

Web scraping is a powerful tool for extracting and analyzing data from websites, a skill increasingly valuable in the modern legal landscape. This seminar will introduce participants to the fundamentals of web scraping, equipping future lawyers with technical skills needed for research beyond legal databases.

We will begin by installing essential libraries. Then, we will learn the basics of how web scraping works and explore key features of libraries like BeautifulSoup.

Hands-on examples will include scraping legal texts from the Legal Information Institute, focusing on 42 U.S.C. §§ 1861–1877 (the founding of the National Science Foundation), extracting geographical data such as “Shapefiles” from the US Census website for US census tracts from 2010, and gathering data on movies played in Boston’s diverse selection of arthouse and repertory cinemas through screenboston.com.

Cybercrimes: Motivations, Operations, and Implications

On 2025-01-22T10:00:00-05:00/2025-01-22T12:00:00-05:00, Hauser Hall 104 Lumbard Classroom, with Ivan Gutierrez

This seminar focuses on a variety of real-world cybercrimes as well as their respective cybercriminals. We will explore the goals of these bad actors, with what technical methods they were able to achieve said goals, and how individuals, corporations, and governments have, could, or should react to these kinds of digital crimes. Topics will include malware, ransomware, fraud, data breaches, and cyberterrorism. This seminar will touch on the importance of privacy, social engineering, and ethical dilemmas that encompass the study of cybercrimes as a whole.