Kismet Jackson used to carry her handgun just about everywhere in San Bernardino County. To get her nails done. To pick up her prescription. To hang out with her grandchildren. For her, it was all about staying safe. "Being out and about, you just want to protect yourself," explained Jackson, an Air Force veteran and member of the National African American Gun Assn.

A few months before COVID shut the world down in 2020, I published a book called The Future of Another Timeline. Set in 2022, it's about a group of time travelers who live in an alternate United States where abortion was never legalized. Working in secret, they travel 130 years back to the 19th century to foment protests against the anti-abortion crusader Anthony Comstock. Their goal is to change the course of history. When they return to 2022, abortion is legal in a few states, though it remains illegal in the majority of them.

Match says its lawsuit is anything but baseless -- detailing, in hundreds of pages of court documents, numerous similarities between the two apps. In the process, Match has accused Bumble of "almost every type of [intellectual property] infringement you could think of," says Sarah Burstein, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law whose research focuses on design patents. One of the central questions revolves around Tinder's patented system for connecting people over the Internet. The matching is based on mutual interest, as expressed through a swiping motion.

Andrei Iancu, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), says that the courts have strayed on the issue of patent eligibility, including signaling he thought algorithms using artificial intelligence were patentable as a general proposition. That came in a USPTO oversight hearing Wednesday (April 18) before a generally supportive Senate Judiciary Committee panel. Both Iancu and the legislators were in agreement that more clarity was needed in the area of computer-related patents, and that PTO needed to provide more precedential opinions when issuing patents so it was not trying to reinvent the wheel each time and to better guide courts. At issue are Supreme Court decisions that Iancu said had injected "a degree of uncertainty" into that area of law. He said PTO would come up with guidelines to help better define what is patent-eligible, but that it was a challenge that needed to be addressed by Congress and stakeholders as well.

Is it possible to predict the outcomes of legal cases – such as Supreme Court decisions – using Artificial Intelligence (AI)? I recently had the opportunity to consider this point at a talk that I gave entitled "Machine Learning Within Law" at Stanford. The general idea behind such approaches is to use computer-based analysis of existing data (e.g. The approach to using data to inform legal predictions (as opposed to pure lawyerly analysis) has been largely championed by Prof. Katz – something that he has dubbed "Quantitative Legal Prediction" in recent work.

Supreme Court judges could soon be out of a job, as it appears that robots are just as good in court. Scientists have designed a machine-learning algorithm that can accurately predict over 70 per cent of Supreme Court decisions. The team believes that the bot could be used to help lawyers frame their arguments to succeed in the courtroom. Supreme Court judges could soon be out of a job, as it appears that robots are just as good in court. The researchers created an algorithm based on a neural network, which tries to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn.

Artificial intelligence can predict Supreme Court decisions better than some experts. "See you in the Supreme Court!" President Donald Trump tweeted last week, responding to lower court holds on his national security policies. But is taking cases all the way to the highest court in the land a good idea? Artificial intelligence may soon have the answer. A new study shows that computers can do a better job than legal scholars at predicting Supreme Court decisions, even with less information.

Artificial intelligence can predict Supreme Court decisions better than some experts. "See you in the Supreme Court!" President Donald Trump tweeted last week, responding to lower court holds on his national security policies. But is taking cases all the way to the highest court in the land a good idea? Artificial intelligence may soon have the answer. A new study shows that computers can do a better job than legal scholars at predicting Supreme Court decisions, even with less information.

The Journalism Department at Emerson College and the Emerson Engagement Lab recently invited William Li to give a talk to introduce machine learning to journalism and communications students. This is a live blog account of the talk by Catherine D'Ignazio. William Li is a 2015–2016 Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a 2016 PhD computer science graduate from MIT. He develops and applies machine learning methods to answer social science questions computationally and to promote public understanding of law, politics, and public policy. His projects include predicting the authors of unsigned Supreme Court opinions, visualizing the complexity of our laws, and discovering ideas from large collections of public comments on proposed regulations. William has also worked on recommender systems, speech recognition, and user activity prediction at Apple and Mitsubishi Electric. He did his master's degrees at MIT in computer science and the Technology and Policy Program, founded the MIT Assistive Technology Club, and has taught classes that involve civic collaborations with organizations such as the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Cambridge Commission for People with Disabilities. William Li introduces the topic and that he wants to make the session very interactive.