CS+Law
Research Workshop

When: Third Friday of each month at 1PM Central Time (sometimes fourth Friday; next workshop: Friday, January 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time) 

What: First 90 minutes: Two presentations of CS+Law works in progress or new papers with open Q&A. Last 30 minutes: Networking.

Where: Zoom

Who: CS+Law faculty, postdocs, PhD students, and other students (1) enrolled in or who have completed a graduate degree in CS or Law and (2) engage in CS+Law research intended for publication.

A Steering Committee of CS+Law faculty from Berkeley, Boston U., U. Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, North Carolina Central, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn, Technion, and UCLA organizes the CS+Law Monthly Workshop. A different university serves as the chair for each monthly program and sets the agenda.

Why: The Steering Committee’s goals include building community, facilitating the exchange of ideas, and getting students involved. To accomplish this, we ask that participants commit to attending regularly.

Computer Science + Law is a rapidly growing area. It is increasingly common that a researcher in one of these fields must interact with the other discipline. For example, there is significant research in each field regarding the law and regulation of computation, the use of computation in legal systems and governments, and the representation of law and legal reasoning. There has been a significant increase in interdisciplinary research collaborations between researchers from CS and Law. Our goal is to create a forum for the exchange of ideas in a collegial environment that promotes building community, collaboration, and research that helps to further develop CS+Law as a field.

Workshop 30: Friday, January 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time 

Please join us for our next CS+Law Research Workshop online on Friday, January 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Chicago Time).

Workshop 30 Organizer:  University of Pennsylvania (Christopher S. Yoo and Justin (Gus) Hurwitz)

Agenda:

20-minute presentation - Talia Gillis

10-minute Q&A

20-minute presentation - Konstantinos Stylianou

10-minute Q&A

30-minute open Q&A about both presentations

30-minute open discussion 

Presentation 1: Operationalizing the Search for Less Discriminatory Alternatives in Fair Lending

Presenter: Talia Gillis is Associate Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School.  Her research focuses on household financial behavior and how consumer welfare is shaped by technological and legal changes.  She is a Member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and a Program Chair of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT).

Abstract: 

The Less Discriminatory Alternative is a key provision of the disparate impact doctrine in the United States. In fair lending, this provision mandates that lenders must adopt models that reduce discrimination when they do not compromise their business interests. In this paper, we develop practical methods to audit for less discriminatory alternatives. Our approach is designed to verify the existence of less discriminatory machine learning models – by returning an alternative model that can reduce discrimination without compromising performance (discovery) or by certifying that an alternative model does not exist (refutation). We develop a method to fit the least discriminatory linear classification model in a specific lending task – by minimizing an exact measure of disparity (e.g., the maximum gap in group FNR) and enforcing hard performance constraints for business necessity (e.g., on FNR and FPR). We apply our method to study the prevalence of less discriminatory alternatives on real-world datasets from consumer finance applications. Our results highlight how models may inadvertently lead to unnecessary discrimination across common deployment regimes, and demonstrate how our approach can support lenders, regulators, and plaintiffs by reliably detecting less discriminatory alternatives in such instances.

Presentation 2: Asset Delisting: The New Antitrust Battleground in the Crypto-Economy

Presenter: Konstantinos Stylianou is Professor of Competition Law and Regulation at the University of Glasgow.  His research and teaching focus on digital markets, blockchain, and high-tech industries in general. He serves on the Program Committee of the ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law, the Academic Advisory Board  of the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications, and the Board of Advisors of the Internet Commission.

Abstract: 

In December 2024, Coinbase was sued for $1 billion for monopolization on the grounds of delisting wBTC, an interoperable version of Bitcoin that competes with Coinbase’s own version. The year before, a class action lawsuit was filed in the UK against a number of exchanges that allegedly colluded to delist BSV, a Bitcoin fork, resulting in $12 billion losses to investors. These cases echo numerous others that have emerged over the years in the crypto-economy challenging the criteria that exchanges apply to list and delist assets on their platforms. In lack of regulation on the matter, it falls on antitrust law to determine whether arbitrary (de)listing can distort competition in the crypto-economy. But none of the existing antitrust offences squarely describes this conduct. The two most relevant offences, anticompetitive discrimination and self-preferencing, each presents its own issues that cast their applicability in doubt, especially under US antitrust law (as opposed to EU competition law). The stakes are evidently high, since delisting from a popular exchange can severely harm assets’ adoption. This early-stage piece will attempt to highlight the issue and its impact and discuss whether antitrust law and policy have the tools to intervene. It will offer contrasting views between US and EU antitrust law, and will also touch on potential regulatory options to address the issue if antitrust law fails.

Join us to get meeting information

Join our group to get the agenda and Zoom information for each meeting and engage in the CS+Law discussion.

Interested in presenting?

Submit a proposed topic to present. We strongly encourage the presentation of works in progress, although we will consider the presentation of more polished and published projects.

2024-25 Series Schedule

Friday, September 20, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Northwestern)

Friday, October 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UC Berkeley)

Friday, November 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: University of Chicago)

Friday, January 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UPenn)

Friday, February 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Cornell)

Friday, March 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Tel Aviv University + Harvard)

Friday, April 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: TBD)

Friday, May 16, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Georgetown)

Background - CS+Law Monthly Workshop

Northwestern Professors Jason Hartline and Dan Linna convened an initial meeting of 21 CS+Law faculty at various universities on August 17, 2021 to propose a series of monthly CS+Law research conferences. Hartline and Linna sought volunteers to sit on a steering committee. Hartline, Linna, and their Northwestern colleagues provide the platform and administrative support for the series.