Cloris Li is a third-year law student at Georgetown University Law Center and holds a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. During her time at McCourt, she completed a year-long capstone project with the Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative, where she conducted comparative data analysis to identify patterns of wrongful convictions. Her work with the initiative deepened her interests in the intersection of public policy and law and motivated her to continue the research through a legal lens. She earned her undergraduate degree from Davidson College, where she double majored in Political Science and East Asian Studies.
Coding Injustice: Addressing Gender Bias in Algorithmic Decision-making
Emerging technologies are increasingly integrated into the criminal legal system. One example is COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), an actuarial risk and needs assessment tool that is used to evaluate defendants’ risk profiles, including their likelihood of recidivism and risk of violence. This project examines the extent to which algorithmic systems like COMPAS may produce gender bias and explores the legal remedies and policy interventions that are available to address the problems underlying these algorithms.