This is an archival version of Coding the Law's Fall 2020 course site. The current version can be found here.
Click the green flag to start. Game by Hiro-Protagonist (Colarusso). See original. This game was made in Scratch, an educational programming language. We introduce coding with Scratch in Level 4 if you want to try your hand at making something similar.

Coding the Law
Suffolk Law School: Fall 2020
by @Colarusso

A self-guided LegalTech Adventure for folks with or without prior coding experience. Watch the video below for more.

Expectation Setting: Click for details

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Richard Feynman

Learn how to think about technologies in the law by building your own. In this project-based course, open to non-programmers and coders alike, we explore the technical, legal, and ethical dimensions behind the use of computer algorithms by legal practitioners and the justice system. Projects range from the creation of simple document review and automation tools to the construction of expert systems and narrow AIs.

Students' final projects will address real-world needs. You won't just learn how to do things, you'll actually do them. Design your own project, or join the Lab's COVID-19 response—the Document Assembly Line Project—focusing on access to justice during the pandemic. For help calibrating your expectations, read this statement.

Not a Suffolk Law student? You're welcome to work through the materials here, join our Slack channel, and even help out with the Document Assembly Line, but I'm afraid you won't be able to attend our synchronous meet ups/classes. No one will grade your work, and the only credit you'll receive is the knowledge of a job well done. That being said, you're free to work through what's here at your own pace. ;)

What Lawyers Should Learn to Code
30-60 min. Protip: You can watch YouTube videos at more than 1X speed.

Optional Media. If you want to learn more about some of the topics discussed in the video above, and you have some free time, you might enjoy the following.

  • In the talk I said I'd be tweeting out some links. You can find them in this thread.
  • How to Fix A Drug Scandal, a Netflix series examining the Dookhan Drug Lab Scandal. I haven't had a chance to watch this, but my impression from those who have seen it are that it does a reasonably good job with a single exception—not focusing as much as they could have on the role of the public defender's in the litigation. CPCS (the MA defenders org) and the ACLU worked together on these cases throughout, but I'm told CPCS attorneys weren't given much screen time. :/
  • The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick, includes a good discussion of the work of both Babbage and Lovelace as it relates to the Analytical Engine.
  • Arcadia, a play by Tom Stoppard about time, uncertainty, and chaos bases its protagonist, Thomasina Coverly, on Ada Lovelace. Lovelace's father, Lord Byron, actually helps to drive part of the plot. If you liked Shakespeare in Love or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead you should check it out.

How this Works

A meme of the ring from Lord of the Rings with the words, 'one page to rule them all.'
You can't have an online class in 2020 without some memes.

Starting in late August 2020, a new level page will appear on this website every week. If you are taking the class for credit, you must complete each level before its weekly meet up. If we're lucky, the levels will show up early, and you can work ahead. Enrolled students also need to complete a final project, described here.

Everything you need for a single level will be presented on a single page. One page to rule them all. Each level, aside from this one (since it's the first) should take about six hours and forty minutes to complete. Including the video above and our weekly meet up, this level should take about four and a half hours. Levels will generally include a mix of readings, videos, and independent projects.

If you have cookies enabled, your answers to questions on level pages, like this one, are saved locally for this browser. They are NOT graded or shared with me. They are presented as an aid to help you in the moment. Your weekly reflections, however, are saved and shared with me. Additionally, you'll be asked to log a rough estimate of the time you spent working on each level to help me calibrate the time estimates you find here.

You can ignore it, but I've added a stopwatch to the bottom right of each level page to help you track your time, not visible on mobile devices. It starts when you hit play and pauses when you close or reload the page, hit pause, or edit the time, which you can do by clicking on the time and typing. Like the answers to questions on this page, this information is stored locally in this browser and not shared with me.

🚨 When working on a project, if you are spinning your wheels for more than 30 min, ask for help! The best place to do this is via Slack (described below). You can ask me for help privately or put a call out to the whole-class channel. The latter is strongly encouraged. Chances are if you're having an issue, someone else has already dealt with it or others are likely to face it in the future. Either way, asking your question in the public helps everyone. Your success is dependent on asking for help. Heck, if you knew everything already you wouldn't need the class. When in doubt, ask for help! It's literally my job to help you. 🚨

A note on front loading: our project-based exercises will be front loaded so folks can get exposure to things early on. The hope is that this will help build a foundation upon which you can build your final project. These assignments will diminish in number as time goes on such that the last three levels' asynchronous work will be devoted only to readings and work on your final project.

Course Texts

We'll start reading from these texts in Level 2. If you haven't already, you can purchase or rent a copy from the bookstore.

Readings
~ 20 Minutes

We will discuss the following readings at our weekly meet up.

Knowledge Base

Everyone comes to this adventure with a different background. So this section is designed to be a menu of sorts. If you already know a topic well, you can skip the relevant material. Just answer the questions below, and section(s) will disappear accordingly. That being said, if a section doesn't disappear, you should do it. Any time you save skipping a topic, however, should be spent working on your final project or reading ahead in either Weapons of Math Destruction or How Not to Be Wrong. FYI, we will be reading all of Weapons of Math Destruction and all but parts III and V of How Not to Be Wrong.

This week I'm asking you to set up a few accounts and take some tools for a spin. This will allow us to hit the ground running at our weekly meet up. You will be publishing some of your work to the Web. So some of your usernames, like your GitHub username, will be publicly associated with your work. Choose them accordingly. Also, let me know if you plan on using a pseudonym for public-facing work so I know who is who.

All of that being said, here are a few questions to see if we can pare things down.


Are you proficient with QnA Markup?




Do you have a good text editor? I'm not asking about a word processor, there's a difference.




Do you have a GitHub account, and do you know how to use it?




Two Windows / Two Screens?

A screen shot of this site next to a window where you are being asked to code
A screen shot of this site next to a window where you are being asked to code.

This site was designed to be placed in a window off to the side of your screen so you could work while watching videos and referencing texts. This should be especially helpful when working on coding projects. If you're screen is too small for this, I suggest opening this page on your phone and placing it next to your computer screen. This won't help when you're asked to cut and paste text, but at least you can watch and work along with videos. You may also want to open Slack (our chat tool described below) in a tab in the window with this page, so it too can sit off to the side while you work. Remember, if you're spinning your wheels, you should use Slack to ask for help.

Secure Your Passwords

You'll find yourself creating a bunch of accounts as you work your way through these lessons. So here's some free advice. You should take security seriously. What's a good password? One that's hard for someone to "guess"/discover. We all know a long pass phrase or random collection of numbers and letters is good form, but it's all for not if you use the same password for multiple accounts and one of them gets hacked. Likewise, if there's a post-it on your laptop with your login, it doesn't really help if someone steals your laptop. Best practices: (1) store your passwords in an encrypted password manager; (2) don't reuse passwords; (3) actually use random passwords; and (4) set up a login/lock for your computer(s) and phone(s).

Want a free and simple option? We suggest LastPass. If you like wordplay, however, there's always RememBear. In general, you may want to choose a manager that allows for local storage of passwords on a single device (like your phone). This usually means that you don't have to pay for a subscription. It also means your passwords stay on a single device, not the cloud. However, this makes phone backups even more important, and sometimes (as with RememBear) you have to sign up for a free subscription and cancel it before the trial runs out to access the free local functionality. Always read the fine print! Anywho, you should be backing up all of your devices! Ask me sometime about my 1L laptop failure in the middle of my Contracts exam.

Also suggested: (1) if you can, turn on two-factor authentication; and (2) conisder encrypting your hard drive.

And of please, esp. if you encrypt your hard drive, make sure you will never forget the password you use to get into your password manager. If you do, it's like losing everything.

Slack
~ 5 Minutes

Slack, a business-friendly chat program, is our primary communication hub. Consequently, you should join our team. Once you have, DM me @Colarusso to say "hi," and I'll add you to our channel (#coding_the_law). Alternatively, you can join the channel on your own. It's a public channel. So anyone can join. Enrolled students are expected to regularly check Slack or to set up push notifications. If you wish, you can download the app for your phone or desktop.

I’ll be available intermittently over Slack throughout the week and at odd times of night. Don’t worry about bothering me. If I’m unavailable, I won’t answer. That being said, this is another good reason to ask questions in the #coding_the_law channel. There are just more folks there. Note: when communicating over Slack, a screenshot is your friend, esp. when dealing with an error message. See below.

How to take a screenshot

Because it's good to know and easy to forget, here are instructions for taking a screen shot: Mac Instructions; PC Instructions.

QnA Markup
25-30 Minutes. Protip: You can watch YouTube videos at more than 1X speed.

Here is a link to the QnA Markup editor. If you'd like to save/download QnA source or HTML content directly from the editor, I suggest using the Chrome browser as these features aren't supported by all browsers. You can of course save this content by cutting and pasting text into a text editor. Also, keep in mind that a space and a tab are not the same. For QnA to recognize something as indented, you must use tabs.

Take 20 min to review the Syntax page and work through a few of the examples found in the Quick Start Guide.

A Good Text Editor
~ 10 Minutes

You'll need a tool to read and write code, and no, Microsoft Word won't do the trick. You need a text editor. Have you ever tried to cut and paste something from Word only to have the formatting all messed up? That's because there's a bunch of unseen stuff mixed in with your text. Unlike word processors, text editors don't touch anything but text and they often highlight your code, making it easier to read. Some popular (and free) text editors include Atom, Notepadd++ (Windows only), and Visual Studio Code. If you don't have a text editor, download and install one from the preceding list. It will come in handy soon. Also, these editors (esp. Atom) are highly customizable. See e.g., Atom Packages (you may want to disable "autocomplete-plus" and download and enable "spell-check").

Google Account
~ 5 Minutes

We'll be using Google Forms to collect your reflections and log your work. This will require you to have a Google Account. You can create an account here. If you don't want to create a Gmail account, don't worry. You can associate your account with an existing email. See e.g.,

Screen shot showing where to select gmail or other email

GitHub
~ 20 Minutes

Git is a system for managing the many versions of code one writes over the course of a coding project. At one level, it acts like track changes for computer code, allowing multiple people to collaborate on a single project. GitHub is a website on which you can host and manage projects using Git. It's also a community of users where people share their code. If you haven't already, you can create a GitHub account here (choose the free plan).

Complete GitHub's Hello World activity. This will introduce you to a bunch of nomenclature and help give you a sense for how GitHub works.

GitHub Pages
~ 10 Minutes

In this exercise, we're going to publish a website using GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is a free service offered by GitHub. What does it do? In short, it serves your code from a webserver, placing it on the Web.

GitHub Pages places the code from your repo (or some subset of that code) on a webserver for others to access over the Internet. Yes, people can already see your code if they visit your repo's page on GitHub.com, but their browsers don't interpret that code. That is, they see the text of the code, not the "final product." By serving your code on a webserver you can actually place your code live on the Web. GitHub Pages restricts what it will serve to something called static content (things like HTML), but that's all we need for our purposes.

Make sure you're signed into GitHub.com and create a new repo called "ctl" with the following description, "A collection of work for my Coding the Law class," and be sure to select "Initialize this repository with a README."

screen shot

After creating the repo, click on Settings.

screen shot

Scroll down to the GitHub Pages section and select master branch from the Source pulldown. Then click Save.

screen shot

This will update your settings page, showing where on the web your page is being served (e.g., https://colarusso.github.io/ctl/).

screen shot

If you visit your page, you'll see the content of your README.md file served as a webpage. That's because the the README is the only file on your site.

screen shot

Customarily, webpages aren't Markdown files (.md). They're normally HTML files. We'll get in to HTML (.html) more in another exercise, but like markdown, they're just text files filled with content conforming to a set structure. Use your text editor to create a new "text" file named hello-world.html. It should have the following content.

screen shot

You can cut and paste the code from here:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello world!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
      Hello world!
  </body>
</html>

After you've saved your file, drag and drop it into your repository (or click Add file and upload it), then commit your change like so.

Wait a minute or two (it can take a few minutes for your GitHub Pages site to update) then in your browser visit https://[your username].github.io/ctl/hello-world.html. If everything worked, you should see something like this.

screen shot

Congratulations. You've published a webpage! 🎉

Twitter

There is a vibrant and welcoming community of #LegalTech folks on Twitter. If you don't have an account, you should consider creating one (not required) and following a selection of folks. It may sound funny, but I owe some nontrivial part of my professional success to the connections I've made as part of this community. Here are a few starter lists:

And of course, you can follow me @Colarusso.

Ready to Go?

Before we assign you a mission, let's make sure we're on the same page, and don't worry. Your answers to these questions are only saved to this device. It's just a self-test to make sure you know what you need to succeed on your mission. This is by no means an exhaustive test of what you need to know, but if you find yourself missing something, take it as a suggestion to revisit the materials above. If you pared things down based on an answer to the Knowledge Base questions, consider changing the answer and reviewing the material.


If you want to save output from QnA Markup without cutting and pasting text, what browser should you use?





Can you use spaces to indent tags in QnA Markup?




Self-Reflection and Logging Your Work
~20 min

At the end of every level before the statement of your closing challenge (Your Mission), we ask that you take a few minutes to reflect on how things are going. For most levels I'll also include a set of reading questions to queue things up for our synchronous discussion. Your answers will be shared with me and it will let me know that I can look for any project work you may have posted to GitHub. That being said, you've almost completed Level 1. Tell me how it's going by completing the form linked below.

Your Mission: Thinking in Flowcharts
15-30 Minutes. Protip: You can watch YouTube videos at more than 1X speed.

Here's the DACA memo, our flowchart, and the debugging sheet mentioned above. You only need to read pages 1 and 2 of Debugging, up until Using an online debugger.

To be clear, we will devote 20 to 30 minutes of our meet up to working on this challenge. You will work in groups while I circulate between breakout rooms. To be clear, you shouldn't start work on this challenge until we meet, aside from watching the video and reading the two pages noted above. Obviously, if you're not an enrolled student, you'll have to do this work independently. See the meet up section for more context.

Synchronous Meet Up, AKA our Class Time
1 hour | August 24, 2020 @ 5pm Eastern

Leonardo Dicaprio from the Great Gatsby toasting
By the time we're done with our meeting, you will be a coder!

If you're an enrolled student, we'll be meeting at this link on Monday August 24th at 5pm via Zoom. You should have received the password from me earlier. If you don't have the password, and you are a registered student, DM me on Slack, and I can give you the password. Note: this meeting starts an hour after our official start time of 4pm Eastern because we will only need an hour of our two-hour block for synchronous work. So I figured why not give everyone an extra hour to finish working through the above. If you're not an enrolled student, I'm afraid you can't join us.

FWIW, I love virtual backgrounds. If you do too, here's a nice source for royalty-free images.

We will use this time to: (1) get to know each other a little; (2) troubleshoot any issues folks might have had working through the knowledge base; (3) complete your mission; and (4) discuss the readings.

We will add the following to your mission's QnA. Note the use of the Title, Author, and Before tags.

Title: DACA "Flowchart"
Author: [your name]
Before: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://suffolklitlab.org/howto/qna/style/style.css">
<div id="icon" style="background-size: 110px 99px;background-image: url('https://suffolklitlab.org/howto/qna/images/maxheadroom.gif');"></div>
<h2 style="text-align:center;">DACA "Flowchart"</h2>
<p><b>This is a <a href="https://www.codingthelaw.org/#mission">class project</a>. You should not rely on it as a source of legal information!</b></p>
<p>Answer the following questions to see if someone qualifies for DACA.</p>

When we are done, you will publish your mission QnA's source code and HTML output to:

https://[your username].github.io/ctl/daca.txt and

https://[your username].github.io/ctl/daca.html respectively.

Time estimates are just that—estimates. The assumptions used to calculate reading time are as follows: 48 pages is assumed to take roughly an hour to read. When working with non paginated texts, it is assumed that a page is roughly equal to 250 words. Videos assume both 2X and 1X viewing. Estimates for coding are based on past experience. Each level, except for this first one, should include about 6 hours and 40 min of work.