Teaching the Technology of Choice

Choice making is a pervasive aspect of most forms of legal work. It’s central to case strategy, client counseling, advocacy, negotiation, document drafting, and adjudication. Yet law school courses rarely thematize it.
Humans evolved in environments that didn’t afford the luxury of many complex choices. Our ‘original equipment’ for decision making is not up to today’s realities. Brains run a quite buggy stack of software. Dozens of cognitive biases that afflict us have been documented. It’s a miracle we ever make good decisions.
Modern technology make possible many intelligent tools for supporting choice, yet they are rarely leveraged in law practice or legal service delivery, let alone considered in the academy.
This session will be a preview of a new course being offered at Suffolk Law School this fall on ‘decision making and choice management.’ While covering some aspects of probabilistic reasoning and decision trees, the course will focus largely on choices that depend on resolving tradeoffs among competing considerations. It will emphasize experiential learning, in the spirit of the Apps-4-Justice movement, with students building useful models and applications that can help legal professionals and laypeople make law-related decisions. It will examine the choiceboxing system, which leverages interactive visualization and social production techniques to support reflective and collaborative deliberation. And it will pay special attention to the comparable strengths and weaknesses of various decision support tools and methods.