CMU, Fordham Law School Lead NSF Project To Bridge Law and Computing

Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS) and Fordham University School of Law are collaborating on a new National Science Foundation program to study innovative ways to make software more accountable by bridging the gap between law and computing. To date, law and software engineering have been largely siloed, and legal accountability is typically addressed late in the design process, after key decisions have been made and when the cost to change those decisions is high. Society places a great deal of trust in software-intensive computing systems and in those responsible for designing them, but designers often lack a blueprint for how to build legally compliant software and applications. Without that roadmap, lawyers and engineers struggle to anticipate when and how software could fail to comply with law, why it failed, and who was harmed as a result. "Because lawyers and engineers come from different risk cultures, with two different bodies of knowledge and expertise, their communication can be fraught with a variety of problems," said Travis Breaux , an associate professor in SCS's Software and Societal Systems Department. "When we train the next generation of software engineers, we want them equipped to ask the right questions and even to help drive the discussion around how to build legal protections for consumers into software. This requires a new skill set to speak to lawyers about technical and legal risks, and balancing innovation and market leadership with protecting consumer rights." The SCS-Fordham Law project aims to break down this barrier by discovering methods that align legal and engineering considerations from both disciplines, allowing design teams to make accountability decisions early in the software design process.