uvalawai

Schedule

Week 1 (29 August 2025)

Pre-Course Survey

cs4501 students only: Submit this pre-course survey before 5pm on Thursday, 28 August:
cs4501: Pre-Course Survey (Google Form)

Readings: (to be read before class)

Frank H. Easterbrook, Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse, 1996 University of Chicago Legal Forum 207 (1996). [PDF]
Ted Chiang, ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, The New Yorker, 9 February 2023. [PDF] [Original Site]

Week 2

Readings: (to be read and thought about before classs on Friday 5 September)

Mark Riedl, The Intuition Behind How Large Language Models Work, Part I, Medium (Aug. 6, 2025).
Mark Riedl, The Intuition Behind How Large Language Models Work, Part II, Medium (Aug. 13, 2025)
William A. Ryan, et al., Practical Lessons from the Attorney AI Missteps in Mata v. Avianca, Association of Corporate Counsel (Aug. 8, 2023).
Introduction to Law and Legal Systems, Chapter 1 from Don Mayer et al., Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance (2012)

The Law students are also reading the first three readings, but not the Introduction to Law and Legal Systems chapter, which covers things they are expected to already know well from having at least a year of Law school. Please think about any questions you have from that and ask them in class (or email us before class) on Friday.

Homework

Submit the Homework 1: Using LLMs assignment in canvas by 9pm on Wednesday: https://canvas.its.virginia.edu/courses/147155/assignments/757555
If you joined the class late and missed the message about the pre-course survey, please make sure to submit this soon: https://forms.gle/ApXvZV5LorAX2SD46

Link to notebooks from class:

Note to run these yourself, you will need to get a token from https://huggingface.co/.

Week 3

Readings:

Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt & Arvind Narayanan, Chapter 3: Classification from Fairness and Machine Learning (2023). Chapter link or PDF
Solon Barocas & Andrew D. Selbst, Big Data’s Disparate Impact, 104 California Law Review 671 (2016), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477899. Direct PDF link

Homework

Submit Homework 2: Document Bot in canvas before 9pm on Wednesday, 10 September. Note that this requires reading the Barocas & Selbst paper first.