XClose

UCL Faculty of Laws

Menu

The Future of Justice: Harnessing the Power of Empirical Research

14 May 2018–15 May 2018, 1:30 pm–6:30 pm

The Future of Justice Conference at UCL

Event Information

Open to

Invitation Only

Organiser

UCL Laws

Location

UCL Laws

About the conference
The England and Wales justice system is undergoing rapid change in an ambitious
reform programme designed to transform processes in criminal, civil and family courts, and tribunals.

The move to online determination of disputes and court closures represents a shift away from the model through which the principles of public justice have traditionally been advanced. These changes have implications for citizens, the judiciary, the legal profession, and court staff as they adapt to new mechanisms for delivering justice. The reforms also create important opportunities for generating robust data on court processes, the individuals that use them and case outcomes.

The wide-ranging nature of the reform programme represents a challenge to the existing community of justice system researchers and funders. What new skills, methods and approaches are needed to properly understand the impact of justice system reforms?

This international symposium, jointly convened by UCL Faculty of Laws, the Nuffield Foundation and The Legal Education Foundation brought together leading researchers, judiciary, funders and practitioners to explore these issues and learn from existing best practice.

The aim of the symposium was to develop a sense of the emerging priorities for research and a consensus on the level of commitment needed to build capacity to deliver this research agenda.

Speakers included:

  • Professor David Abrams (Penn Law Faculty)
  • Susan Acland-Hood (CEO of HM Courts & Tribunals Service)
  • Professor Karen Broadhurst (Centre Child and Family Justice Research)
  • Dr Natalie Byrom (Legal Education Foundation)
  • Professor Dawn Chutkow (Cornell Law School)
  • Suzie Forell (Research Director, Health Justice Australia)
  • Antoine Garapon (Secretary General of the Institute of Higher Studies on Justice)
  • Professor Dame Hazel Genn  (Director UCL Centre for Access to Justice)
  • Professor Jim Greiner (Harvard Law School)
  • The Rt Hon the Baroness Hale of Richmond DBE (President of the United Kingdom Supreme Court)
  • Professor Michael Heise (Cornell Law School)
  • District Judge Chris Lethem (Judicial Advisor to the Online Court)
  • Dory Reiling (Senior Judge, Amsterdam District Court)
  • Professor Judith Resnik (Yale Law School)
  • Joshua Rozenberg QC (Hon) (Commentator and broadcaster)
  • The Rt Hon Sir Ernest Ryder (Senior President of Tribunals)
  • Shannon Salter (Chair, British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal)
  • Professor Richard Susskind OBE (President, Society for Computers and Law)
  • Dr Ayelet Sela (Bar Ilan University)
  • Professor Tom Tyler (Yale Law School)

About the Organisers

The Legal Education Foundation
The Legal Education Foundation’s vision is of a society where everyone understands the role
and value of the law and has the capability and opportunity to use it. In the UK and overseas, the ways in which citizens engage with the law and legal systems are changing rapidly, creating both challenges and opportunities for access to justice. The nature and the scale of change, exemplified by the reforms being delivered by the HM Courts and Tribunal Service Transformation Programme, underscore the urgent need to harness the power
of empirical research to understand what works in enabling individuals to secure their rights,
protections and fair treatment.

Supporting the creation of robust evidence is critical to TLEF’s mission. Empirical research is
vital: to improve understanding of the ways in which citizens engage with the justice system;
to understand the impacts on outcomes of the move from traditional to new court processes; and to understand how to make the most effective use of public resources. In order to achieve this, we must ensure that court and other data that are vital for the conduct of empirical research are collected routinely and made available for research. We must also support the development and expansion of a multidisciplinary research community with the
methodological skills and expert knowledge of the legal system necessary to deliver the
empirical work required. And we need to strengthen the commitment to evidence-led
approaches in designing and delivering legal services and legal education. These tasks
demonstrate the pressing need to work together to develop a coherent agenda for empirical
research and the will and resources to deliver it. TLEF is delighted to be supporting this
event, which we hope will serve as a catalyst for this effort. We welcome the partnership with the Nuffield Foundation and UCL Faculty of Laws, and look forward to meeting you at the conference.
Matthew Smerdon
Chief Executive, The Legal Education Foundation

The Nuffield Foundation
In 2004, the Foundation funded the Nuffield Inquiry on Empirical Legal Research, which
examined both the UK’s capacity to carry out empirical research, and how the law was
working in practice. Led by Professor Dame Hazel Genn, the Inquiry concluded that
although legal research was highly valued by those working in the justice system, there
was evidence of insufficient capacity within UK universities to undertake empirical legal
research.

Since then, the Nuffield Foundation has funded research projects in the justice domain totalling almost £20 million, and supported initiatives to improve research capacity. Most recently, we have established the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory to support the best possible decisions for children by improving the use of data and research evidence in the family justice system.

However, as the justice system undergoes fundamental reform in a time of austerity,
the ‘justice research gap’ has opened further, and we find ourselves without the necessary
empirical research to inform the design and operation of a transformed justice system.
This symposium aims to help close the gap, by articulating the priority questions for the
justice research agenda, and identifying ways we might build capacity to deliver it. The
symposium will also inform our own funding priorities, and we will continue to work with
The Legal Education Foundation and UCL Faculty of Laws to harness the power of empirical research within the justice system
Tim Gardam
Chief Executive, Nuffield Foundation

UCL Centre for Access to Justice
UCL Laws has long been a centre of excellence for high impact empirical research on law and the justice system. Home to world-leading research centres on Access to Justice, Empirical Legal Studies, Judicial Studies, and Professional Ethics, the Faculty’s research has had global influence on policy and practice across a wide range of legal fields. As jurisdictions around the world respond to technological development and undergo transformative changes in the design and delivery of state justice systems, this conference is a timely opportunity to reflect on critical research questions that arise, and to begin shaping an international research agenda. This important research agenda will require co-operation between government, the judiciary, academia and practice. It will also require advanced empirical research skills. Having led on the Nuffield Foundation’s Inquiry into UK capacity to undertake empirical research on law more than a decade ago, and in keeping with the Faculty’s mission to promote and facilitate rigorous empirical research on law, we are conscious of the need to revisit the conclusions of the Inquiry and the recommended interventions. This conference presents that opportunity in the context of an exciting new justice system research agenda.

A significant body of the Faculty’s empirical research has been supported by the Nuffield
Foundation and the Legal Education Foundation and it is therefore a pleasure to have the opportunity to collaborate with them in organizing this international conference on The
Future of Justice.
Professor Dame Hazel Genn
Director, UCL Centre for Access to Justice

The Programme and Slides

Day one - 14 May 2018

1.30pm Welcome and Introduction

Professor Dame Hazel Genn (Director UCL Centre for Access to Justice)

1.40pm Keynote address

Professor Richard Susskind OBE (President, Society for Computers and Law)
‘The Case for Online Courts’

2.00pm PANEL DISCUSSION
What’s happening in justice? The view from England and Wales

3.30pm Break

4.00pm What’s happening in justice? The view from overseas

6.15pm The Nuffield Foundation 75th Anniversary Lecture

  • The Rt Hon the Baroness Hale of Richmond DBE, President of the United Kingdom Supreme Court
    ‘Challenges in the justice system and the contribution of empirical research’
  • Introduced by Professor David Rhind (Chairman, Nuffield Foundation)

Day Two - 15 May 2018

9.30am PANEL DISCUSSION - Open justice, transparency and accountability

11.00am Refreshment break

11.30am Citizen experience of justice and the connection between this and trust and confidence

1.00pm Lunch

2.00pm What do the reforms mean for the judiciary and legal profession?

3.45pm Refreshment break

4.15pm Capacity building - creating an environment conducive to the conduct of robust empirical research

6.15pm Conclusion and reception

About the Speakers

DAVID ABRAMS Pennsylvania Law School
David S. Abrams is Professor of Law, Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School. He joined the Penn faculty in 2008 after serving as the Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago.
He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006, his Master’s in Physics from Stanford in 2001 and his Bachelor’s in Physics from Harvard in 1998. He is a Board Member and past-President of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and former chair of the Law and Economics section of the American Association of Law Schools. His research interests include the Law and Economics of Crime, Intellectual Property, Corporate Finance, and Health Economics. Recent research topics include the use of machine learning to improve fairness in criminal justice, the impact of non-practicing entities on innovation, and improving methods for measuring and valuing innovation. His work has appeared in a number of top peer-reviewed journals and law reviews including the Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Journal of Legal Studies.

SUSAN ACLAND-HOOD HMCTS
Susan Acland-Hood joined HMCTS as Chief Executive in November 2016. She is responsible for the day-to-day operations and management of the courts and tribunals in England and Wales (and reserved tribunals in Scotland and Northern Ireland). She is also responsible for the £1bn reform programme which will upgrade the best justice system in the world using modern technology and ways of working.

Susan was previously the Director of Enterprise and Growth at HM Treasury where she was responsible for policies on productivity, growth, business, infrastructure, exports, competition and markets, and for energy and transport spending. Before that, she spent two years as Director of Education Funding at the Department for Education, overseeing the comprehensive reform of the capital programme. Susan has also worked extensively on home affairs and justice policy, both at Number 10 and in the Home Office. She has also had senior roles in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and in the Social Exclusion Unit.

JUDGE JOHN AITKEN Social Entitlement Chamber
John has been Chamber President of the Social Entitlement Chamber since 2014. His background is the Criminal Bar which he left in 2002 to become an Immigration judge. He then became a Designated Immigration Judge in effect a team leader. He was Acting Regional Judge for the North East in Immigration from 2003 to 2006 then became Deputy President at Health Education and Social Care responsible for Special Educational Needs, Care Standards and Appeals from the NHS all on a national basis. In 2014 he became Chamber President of the Social Entitlement Chamber. SEC is the largest Tribunal with around 100 full time Judges and  2500 fee paid Judges, Doctors and Disability Qualified Members dealing with around 250,000 appeals each year but up to 500,000 in busy periods. There are three jurisdictions covering Social Security Appeals, and Criminal Injuries appeals on a Great Britain basis and Asylum support throughout the United Kingdom. SEC has an important role in the reform program seeking to develop an accessible, user friendly and efficient method of dealing with cases online where appropriate.

KAREN BROADHURST Lancaster University
Professor Karen Broadhurst is based in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She founded and Co-Directs the Centre for Child and Family Justice Research at Lancaster University, co-hosted by the Departments of Law and Sociology with the Data Science Institute. Karen has served as Principal or Co-Investigator on number of applied research studies funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the ESRC, the Australian Research Council, as well as local and national Government. She has a long-standing interest in the impact of State intervention in family life, most recently the impact of child removal on women appearing before the family courts. Karen’s work has catalysed major new prevention initiatives both in England but also a number of international contexts.
 
Karen is currently leading the development of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, to enable the launch of a new organisation in 2019. Karen’s personal investment in this initiative reflects her interest in the potential contribution of social science to social justice and practice innovation. Her work is extensively published in range of social work, social science, health and law journals. She regularly sits on government advisory/expert groups related to both child and family social work and the family courts.

NATALIE BYROM The Legal Education Foundation
Natalie is Director of Research and Learning at The Legal Education Foundation- an independent grant making foundation with a portfolio of over 200 grants – where she leads work to better understand the ways in which people can be assisted to understand and use the justice system to secure their rights, protections and fair treatment. She recently completed a PhD exploring the impact of cuts to civil legal aid on vulnerable individuals, focusing on the experience of Law Centres. Natalie is passionate about improving public understanding of the legal system- in 2017 she was appointed to the BBC Expert Women Network and her research and writing have been featured in The Guardian, the New Statesman and the legal press. Natalie sits on the Administrative Justice Council and the Civil Justice Council’s Litigant in Person Engagement Group.

DAWN CHUTKOW Cornell Law School
Dawn Chutkow is a Visiting Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Executive Editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Executive Director of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies. Her research uses empirical, qualitative, and legal analyses to explore the administrative function of courts, interactions among political institutions, and justice system processes. Her teaching includes courses on the politics of judicial decision making, empirical legal methods, and the nature, functions, and limits of law.
Before entering academia, Professor Chutkow practiced law in Chicago, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.  She earned an A.B. from Duke University, a J.D. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

SUZIE FORELL Health Justice Australia
With more than 25 years’ experience in justice sector research, Suzie recently commenced as Research Director for Health Justice Australia. In this role Suzie will be leading the development of a national evaluation framework for health justice partnerships. Previously Suzie was a Principal Researcher at the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW, where she led the ‘what works’ research strategy and managed research alliances with Legal Aid Commissions to evaluate legal assistance strategies and build evaluation capability.  Suzie evaluated legal assistance strategies including outreach, family law duty services, collaborative partnerships, community legal education and summary crime services. Suzie is an author of Reshaping legal assistance services: building on the evidence base and has a particular interest in integrating evaluative thinking into practice, to build the evidence-base. In 2016-17, Suzie co-led a team of researchers analysing the administrative data of all NSW civil court and tribunals, to investigate its utility to inform policy.  Previously, Suzie was a principal policy analyst with NSW Police, implementing and evaluating national drug strategy initiatives, and a researcher at the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. Suzie has a BA (hons) from Melbourne University and research M Crim (hons) from Sydney.

ANTOINE GARAPON Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la Justice
Born in 1952, Antoine Garapon, Ph.D, is Secretary- General of the Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la Justice (IHEJ). Prior to his appointment to the IHEJ, Antoine Garapon served as a juvenile judge for many years.  He is editor for the journal Esprit and has written widely on legal, cultural, historical and political themes. Its last book (with Jean Lassègue): Justice digitale. Révolution graphique et rupture anthropologique (Presses universitaires de France, 2018). He also manages the collection Bien commun at Michalon Publishing co. and has a weekly programme on France-culture.  

He has published more than thirty books, all of them concerned with law and justice. Notable among his works are Imaginer la loi: le droit dans la littérature (Michalon, Paris 2008); Juger en Amérique et en France: culture juridique française et common law (O. Jacob, Paris 2003); Des crimes qu’on ne peut ni punir ni pardonner: pour une justice internationale (O. Jacob, Paris: 2002); Et ce sera justice: punir en démocratie (O. Jacob, Paris 2001) and, in Spanish, Juez y democracia. Una reflexión muy actual (Judge and Democracy: A Most Up-to-Date Reflection – Flor del Viento, 1998).

DAME HAZEL GENN DBE QC (Hon) UCL Centre for Access to Justice
Dame Hazel Genn is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies in the Faculty of Laws at UCL.  She was Dean of the Faculty 2008-2017 and is currently Director of the UCL Centre for Access to Justice and Co-director of the UCL Judicial Institute.  Dame Hazel is a leading authority on access to civil and administrative justice.  She has conducted numerous empirical studies of public access to the justice system, including the seminal Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law.  In 2013 she established the UCL Centre for Access to Justice, and in 2016 developed its activities into an innovative ‘Health Justice Partnership’ with a GP practice in Stratford delivering free social welfare legal advice to patients within the practice.    Dame Hazel is interested in the access to justice implications of online courts and in October 2017 delivered the Annual Birkenhead Lecture entitled ‘Online Courts and the Future of Justice’.

JIM GREINER Harvard Law School
Jim Greiner is the Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses on civil procedure, expert witnesses, and voting regulation. He is the founder and Faculty Director of the Access to Justice Lab, which implements randomized field experiments to find out what works for individuals and families who cannot afford to hire lawyers.  Before coming to HLS in 2007, Jim practiced law for six years (three for the U.S. Department of Justice, three for Jenner & Block, LLC), followed by a Ph.D. in statistics at Harvard University. His work has been published in a variety of venues including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), the Annals of Applied Statistics, and Jurimetrics.

The Rt Hon the Baroness Hale of Richmond DBE PC LLD FBA President of the United Kingdom Supreme Court
Lady Hale is the United Kingdom’s most senior judge. She became the first woman Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 2004, after a varied career as an academic lawyer, law reformer and judge. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge (where she is now Visitor) and was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1969. She taught Law at Manchester University for 18 years, and practised for a while at the Manchester Bar.

In 1984 she became the first woman to serve on the Law Commission, where she led the work of the family law team, resulting (among others) in the Children Act 1989 and the Mental Capacity Act 2005. In 1994, she was appointed a Judge of the Family Division of the High Court. She was promoted to the Court of Appeal in 1999 and in 2004 to the House of Lords. In 2009, she became the first woman Justice of the Supreme Court, and was appointed Deputy President in 2013 and President in 2017.

Lady Hale was founding editor of the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, and author of the case book on The Family, Law and Society. She was a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation from 1987 to 2002 and Chancellor of the University of Bristol from 2004 to 2016. 

MICHAEL HEISE Cornell Law School
Michael Heise, Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, specializes in empirical legal scholarship and bridging empirical methodologies, legal theory, and policy analysis.  He writes in public and private law areas, including law and education policy, civil justice reform, and judicial decisionmaking.  Professor Heise’s teaching areas include education law, torts, constitutional law, empirical methods for lawyers, insurance law, and law and social science.  In 1991-92 Heise served in the Bush Administration as Deputy Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of Education. Professor Heise has received numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the Law & Society Association’s Best Article Prize in 1999.  Professor Heise has co-edited the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies since 2005.

DISTRICT JUDGE CHRISTOPHER LETHAM Judicial Advisor, Online Courts
Chris Lethem is on part secondment as the judicial lead to the HMCTS Civil Money Claims project charged with developing the Online Court.  He was formerly a member of Lord Justice Brigg’s Hard Working Group that formulated the Report on the Civil Courts Structure Review Group and which provided a blueprint for the modernisation of the civil courts.  He is a member of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee and is charged with supporting the development of rules for the Online Court.  He is also a member of the Online Procedure Advisory Group who consider the development of rules for digital courts across the entire civil, family and tribunal jurisdictions.  He is a member of the Civil Judicial Engagement Group who advise and monitor the civil aspects of HMCTS’ court reform project.

Chris Lethem has a long standing involvement in supporting access to justice for Litigants in Person and is a Litigant in Person Liaison Judge and a member of the Judicial Working Group advising JEB on McKenzie Friends.  He is a member of the Judicial Working Group on Litigants in Person and a member of the Asplin Judicial Working Group on McKenzie Friends.  

He continues to sit as a judge.

DORY REILING Amsterdam District Court
Dory Reiling Ph.D. Mag.Iur. (1950) is a senior judge at the Amsterdam District Court. She is involved in designing the digital procedures in the civil courts in the Netherlands. She was a senior judicial reform specialist at the World Bank and IT program manager for the Netherlands judiciary. She regularly lectures on court IT at universities, judicial academies and postgraduate schools and works as an IT adviser to judiciaries around the world. She is also a co-author of the World Bank Handbook on Justice Sector Assessments. She was the acting expert for the Consultative Council of European Judges (Council of Europe) Opinion 14 on information technologies and the courts. Her 2009 book Technology for Justice, How Information Technology can Support Judicial Reform, is widely available in print, on line and as an e-book.

Her publications can be found on www.doryreiling.com, her tweets are on www.twitter.com/doryontour and her Technology for Justice blog is on www.doryreiling.blogspot.nl

JUDITH RESNIK Yale Law School
Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and holds a term appointment as an Honorary Visiting Professor, UCL Faculty of Laws.  Her teaching and scholarship focuses on the impact of democratic, egalitarian principles on government services, from courts and prisons to post offices; on the relationships of states to citizens and non-citizens’ the forms and norms of federalism; and on equality and gender. Professor Resnik’s books include Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011); she is the co-editor of Federal Courts Stories (2010); Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (2009), and the 2014 Daedalus volume, The Invention of Courts.  Professor Resnik chairs Yale Law School’s Global Constitutional Law Seminar and edits its on-line book series. Professor Resnik is also the founding director of Yale’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law, convening colloquia on access to criminal and civil justice systems.   The 2018 Liman monograph, Who Pays? Fines, Fees, and the Cost of Courts, is an online e-book; earlier monographs include a series of reports on solitary confinement, co-authored with the Association of State Correctional Administrators.  Judith Resnik has been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship to support her work on prison reform and other pressing issues.  Read more about the award and Judith’s work 

JOSHUA ROZENBERG QC (Hon) Journalist and Broadcaster
Joshua Rozenberg QC (hon) is Britain’s best-known commentator on the law. He is the only full-time journalist to have been appointed as Queen’s Counsel honoris causa.

After taking a law degree at Oxford he trained as a solicitor, qualifying in 1976.He is an honorary Master of the Bench (bencher) of Gray’s Inn and holds honorary doctorates in law from four universities.

Joshua has delivered the first two of a series of three annual lectures at Gresham College about the government’s plans to introduce online courts in England and Wales.
For more than a decade he has written a twice-monthly column for the Law Society Gazette. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote a weekly commentary for the Guardian website.
 
Joshua was the BBC’s legal correspondent for 15 years before moving in 2000 to The Daily Telegraph. He resigned as the newspaper’s legal editor in the summer of 2007 but continued writing a weekly column until the end of 2008.

A decade after he left the BBC, Joshua returned in 2010 to present the popular Radio 4 series Law in Action, a programme he had launched in 1984. The programme is broadcast in the spring, summer and autumn each year.

THE RT HON SIR ERNEST RYDER Senior President, Tribunals in the UK
Sir Ernest Ryder is the Senior President of Tribunals in the United Kingdom and is a judge of the Court of Appeal in England and Wales. He is also a judicial member of the Board of Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service.  He was formerly a judge of the Family Division of the High Court.  

Until his appointment to the Court of Appeal, Sir Ernest was the senior Presiding Judge of the Northern Circuit where he sat in the criminal, civil and administrative courts as well as in family.  As Judge in Charge of the Modernisation of Family Justice, he was responsible for the creation of the Family Court and the family justice modernisation programme. In addition to his appointment as the Senior President, he is the Head of Deployment Strategy for the Lord Chief Justice and the Course Director of the Leadership Programme at the Judicial College.  He regularly lectures at the Judicial College, the Judicial Institute in Scotland and at Universities across the United Kingdom.

Sir Ernest started his professional life as a merchant banker and has also been a commissioned officer in the Army Reserves.  He is the Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Bolton, an honorary Professor of Law and a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation.

SHANNON SALTER British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal
Shannon Salter is Chair of the Civil Resolution Tribunal, Canada’s first online tribunal resolving small claims and condominium disputes. She is an adjunct professor at the UBC Allard School of Law, teaching administrative law and legal ethics and professional regulation. Shannon was a BC Supreme Court judicial law clerk before practicing civil litigation at a large Vancouver firm. She has served as a vice chair of the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal and on the College of Registered Nurses of BC. She is currently a commissioner of the Financial Institutions Commission, vice president of the BC Council of Administrative Tribunals, and a board member of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII). She is a co-author of the BC Administrative Decision Maker’s Manual, as well as a number of legal journal articles. Named one of the 25 Top Most Influential Lawyers in Canada in 2017, she was previously recognized as one of Canada’s New Law Pioneers by the Canadian Bar Association and an Access to Justice All-Star by the National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSLAP). In 2016 she was recipient of the Adam Albright award for outstanding teaching by an adjunct professor. Shannon is a frequent speaker at international conferences on online dispute resolution, administrative law, legal education, and the future of law and technology. She has BA and LLB (UBC), and her LLM (Toronto).

AYELET SELA Bar Ilan University
Ayelet Sela is an assistant professor (lecturer) at Bar Ilan University Faculty of Law. Her work unites research in law, social sciences and technology to explore issues of dispute system design, procedural justice, law and technology, and the legal profession. Dr. Sela’s current work spans three areas. First, she examines the impact of process design and technological choice architecture on the behavior and experience of participants in online legal processes. Second, she analyzes the role of courts and judges in an era of vanishing trials and how court process designs and judicial regulation should adapt to current needs. Finally, she collaborates with researchers from the BIU Data Science Institute on studies of digital contracts and court dockets. Previously, Dr. Sela was the socio-legal research coordinator of an ERC-funded research on judicial conflict resolution, a legal auditor in the Israeli Ministry of Justice, a fellow at the Gould Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Center and the Codex Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University, and a legal clerk for Justice Eliezer Rivlin of the Israeli Supreme Court. Dr. Sela holds a JSD and JSM from Stanford Law School and an LL.B from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

RICHARD SUSSKIND OBE Society for Computers and Law
Richard Susskind is President of the Society for Computers and Law, Chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute, and Strategy & Technology Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He chaired the ODR Advisory Group of Civil Justice Council whose radical proposals on online courts have been adopted as judicial and government policy. Richard is the world’s most cited author on the future of legal services. His work has been translated into 15 languages and he has been invited to speak in over 50 countries. He has written numerous books, including The Future of the Law (1996), Transforming the Law (2000), The End of Lawyers? (2008), and Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2013, 2017). His book The Future of the Professions, co-authored with his son Daniel, was recognised as one of the books of 2015 by both the Financial Times and the New Scientist.

Richard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Computer Society. In the 1980s, he wrote his doctorate on artificial intelligence and the law at Balliol College, Oxford. He holds professorships at Oxford University, UCL, Gresham College, and Strathclyde University. An Honorary Bencher at Gray’s Inn, he was awarded an OBE in 2000.

TOM TYLER Yale University
Tom R. Tyler is a Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale University.  His research explores the dynamics of authority in groups, organizations, and societies.  In particular, he examines the role of judgments about the justice or injustice of group procedures in shaping legitimacy, compliance and cooperation.  

Tom is the author of several books, including The social psychology of procedural justice (1988); Social justice in a diverse society (1997); Cooperation in groups (2000); Trust in the law (2002); Why people obey the law (2006); Why people cooperate (2011); and Why Children Follow Rules (2017).  

He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from UCLA in 1978.  Since then he has taught at Northwestern University; the University of California at Berkeley; and New York University.