paper addresses the design of novel, adaptive, research-driven curricula for law and computer science programs for law schools. The parameters for new curricula are broad and demanding. First, there is a range of users for legal technologies, each with motivations and requirements that must be identified and addressed. Second, the users are working in a relatively new environment of Big Data of legal information and widely available, powerful computational tools. Third, there is a spectrum of novel roles that people may fill in the legal technologies sphere. Finally, the research literature on AI and Law offers research to inform the design of curricula and development of legal technologies. Despite dramatic transformations in the demand for and provision of legal technologies, law schools largely teach conventional programs, which do not serve the current, dynamic context. Specifically, law school students are not trained to work with the relevant technologies that are currently being applied to legal practice, nor to understand the application and implications to law of computational tools such as logic, set theory, machine learning, data mining, network analysis, information extraction, or semantic web/knowledge graph, amongst others. Given changes by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board, law schools have the opportunity and financial incentive to evolve multidisciplinary curricula. In our paper, we examine the issues around designing research-driven curricula for law and computer science as well as propose how such curricula ought to be developed. In particular, the foundations should cover the computational tools of formal modelling and scientific, empirical analysis, enabling students and researchers to analyse the data, function, practice, and implications of the law, which in turn facilitate the principled development of software for legal practice. We summarise our experience teaching and doing research in law and computer science. Current curricula are reviewed, and comments are made about the impact of commercial legal technologies. We identify relevant educational roles and goals for training topics. Finally, we outline computational tools, their application to the law, and their integration into the curricula.
paper addresses the design of novel, adaptive, research-driven curricula for law and computer science programs for law schools. The parameters for new curricula are broad and demanding. First, there is a range of users for legal technologies, each with motivations and requirements that must be identified and addressed. Second, the users are working in a relatively new environment of Big Data of legal information and widely available, powerful computational tools. Third, there is a spectrum of novel roles that people may fill in the legal technologies sphere. Finally, the research literature on AI and Law offers research to inform the design of curricula and development of legal technologies. Despite dramatic transformations in the demand for and provision of legal technologies, law schools largely teach conventional programs, which do not serve the current, dynamic context. Specifically, law school students are not trained to work with the relevant technologies that are currently being applied to legal practice, nor to understand the application and implications to law of computational tools such as logic, set theory, machine learning, data mining, network analysis, information extraction, or semantic web/knowledge graph, amongst others. Given changes by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board, law schools have the opportunity and financial incentive to evolve multidisciplinary curricula. In our paper, we examine the issues around designing research-driven curricula for law and computer science as well as propose how such curricula ought to be developed. In particular, the foundations should cover the computational tools of formal modelling and scientific, empirical analysis, enabling students and researchers to analyse the data, function, practice, and implications of the law, which in turn facilitate the principled development of software for legal practice. We summarise our experience teaching and doing research in law and computer science. Current curricula are reviewed, and comments are made about the impact of commercial legal technologies. We identify relevant educational roles and goals for training topics. Finally, we outline computational tools, their application to the law, and their integration into the curricula.