Data for Racial Justice Workday

The Data for Racial Justice workshop teaches data science fundamentals as applied to the California Racial Justice Act population-level disparities test. It is designed to meet three interrelated challenges. First, practitioners remain uncertain how to construct valid comparison groups across race, ethnicity, or country of origin that are nonetheless “similarly situated” and engaged in “similar conduct.” Here, defense attorneys face a second challenge: at best, they must make sense of messy, incomplete, or inaccurate datasets; at worst, they are unable to access necessary police, court, jail, prosecution or prison records at all. Finally, even if data are available, legal professionals may still lack the computational and statistical fluency needed to understand evidence of disparity alongside their experts, communicate and visualize this evidence in court, and effectively counter opposing counsel’s arguments. Each of these three challenges is exacerbated by a lack of time and resources. As such, this workshop provides the much-needed resource of applied data science and statistical training to legal professionals who seek to use quantitative evidence of population-level racial disparities in RJA litigation.

On Sunday 29 September participants will have the opportunity to have a more practical approach and apply the knowledge gathered in the previous two Workshop days.