Events
Seminar @ Cornell Tech: Frank Pasquale
Improving the Digitization of Judgment: Lessons from the Regulation of Credit Scoring
Algorithms for evaluating and judging persons are proliferating. They range from diagnostic tools in intensive care units to predictions of job performance by hiring apps. What Danielle Citron and I called “the scored society” in 2014 has grown to include more sources of data, more sophisticated analyses of this data, and more uses of evaluative technologies in a wider variety of contexts. Policymakers are now grappling with the proper regulation of this digitization of judgment, proposing or applying laws to govern the use of statistical methods in evaluative contexts. As they do so, there is much to learn from the history of credit scoring regulation. Regulatory responses to the frontiers of the digitization of judgment should be informed by a deep understanding of the strengths and limits of past efforts to influence its development in finance.
Speaker Bio
Frank Pasquale is a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. He has written and researched extensively on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. Before coming to Brooklyn Law, he was Piper & Marbury Professor of Law at the University of Maryland, and Schering-Plough Professor of Health Care Regulation & Enforcement at Seton Hall University. He was recently recognized as the third most cited U.S. law professor in the field of Law & Technology, based on the Sisk study’s 2016-2020 reporting period.
Pasquale’s 2015 book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press), has been influential in discussions of fairness, accountability, and transparency in computing, and has been translated in several languages. The book develops a social theory of digitized reputation, search, and finance, while promoting pragmatic reforms to improve the information economy. The journal Big Data & Society hosted an interdisciplinary symposium on The Black Box Society in 2020, to mark the fifth anniversary of the book’s publication.
Pasquale’s latest book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Harvard University Press, 2020) analyzes the law and policy influencing the adoption of AI in varied professional fields. Pasquale has also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford University Press, 2020), and co-authored a casebook on administrative law.
Pasquale’s articles have addressed the regulation of technology in several contexts. His widely cited research has been featured in top law reviews, and he has advised business and government leaders in the healthcare, Internet, and finance sectors, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary and Energy & Commerce Committees, the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He also has advised officials in Canada and the United Kingdom on law and technology policy. He served on the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society from 2014-16, and the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics from 2019-2021, where he chaired the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security.
Pasquale’s work on “algorithmic accountability” has helped bring the insights and demands of social justice movements to AI law and policy. In media and communication studies, he has developed a legal analysis of barriers to, and opportunities for, regulation of Internet platforms. In privacy law and surveillance, his work is among the leading legal research on regulation of algorithmic ranking, scoring, and sorting systems, including credit scoring and threat scoring. In health law, he has written a series of articles addressing both technological and financial challenges to U.S. healthcare institutions.
Pasquale is an Affiliate Fellow at Yale University’s Information Society Project, and a member of the American Law Institute. He is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law (CRCL), based in the Netherlands, and a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).