=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2417/paper3
|storemode=property
|title=Law Data Science and Ethics: the CRIKE Approach
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2417/paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2417
|authors=Silvana Castano,Mattia Falduti,Alfio Ferrara,Stefano Montanelli
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/caise/CastanoFFM19
}}
==Law Data Science and Ethics: the CRIKE Approach==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2417/paper3.pdf
Law Data Science and Ethics: the CRIKE
Approach
Silvana Castano1 , Mattia Falduti1 , Alfio Ferrara1 , and Stefano Montanelli1
Università degli Studi di Milano
DI - Via Celoria, 18 - 20135 Milano
{silvana.castano,mattia.falduti,alfio.ferrara,stefano.montanelli}@unimi.it
Abstract. In the era of big data, research activity on data science fo-
cuses on large datasets to produce knowledge supporting decision-making
processes in different application domains and contexts. Data science
practices and outputs have a tremendous impact on a variety of fields by
raising new ethical issues that become crucial. In this paper, we address
the ethical issues related to the ethics of data, the ethics of algorithms,
and the ethics of practices in the context of our data science approach for
case-law decisions (CLDs) processing called CRIKE (CRIme Knowledge
Extraction). In particular, we discuss the ethical issues that need to be
faced when dealing with knowledge extracted from CLDs for descriptive
analysis purposes and for predictive usage of data extracted from CLDs.
Keywords: case law analysis, data science ethics, ethics of data
1 Introduction
In the era of big data, research activity on data science focuses on collection, pro-
cessing, and interpretation of large datasets to produce knowledge for decision-
making processes in different application domains and contexts. This is stim-
ulated, on one side, and made possible on the other side, by the continuous
production of data coming from disparate data sources and locations and by
the availability of web-based technologies for data storage, integration, analysis
and mining, thus enabling behavior and trend prediction as well as descriptive
statistics for facts and events. Ethical issues play a crucial role in data sci-
ence processes, to improve the social impact and the scientific quality of data
science practices and outputs. For example, in [14], a framework is proposed
for the enforcement of ethical oversight over the dissemination and use of Big
and Open Data. The framework is grounded on the importance of encouraging
critical thinking and ethical reflection among the researchers involved in data
processing practices. As discussed by Floridi in [9], the main ethical challenges
in data science can be classified as follows: i) ethics of data, focused on collection
and analysis of large dataset; ii) ethics of algorithms, focused on complexity and
PIE 2019, June 4, 2019, Rome, Italy. Copyright held by the author(s).
2 S. Castano et al.
autonomy of algorithms, and iii) ethics of practices, addressed to draft ethical
framework to shape professional codes, strategies and policies. On this ground,
in the paper we address ethical issues in the context of our data science approach
for case-law decisions (CLDs) processing called CRIKE (CRIme Knowledge Ex-
traction). The CRIKE approach has been conceived for processing large datasets
of CLDs coming from diverse law sources (e.g., first grade, Court of appeal) to
automatically discover applications of legal abstract term’s in court’s decision
texts. CRIKE relies on the LATO ontology where abstract terms and decision
verdicts are formally defined by means of concepts and relations. A detailed de-
scription of the LATO ontology design and of the CRIKE knowledge extraction
processes is provided in [5]. The CRIKE process workflow covers all the phases of
a conventional data science process: i) data collection, where CLDs are collected
and stored in digital format for subsequent analysis, ii) knowledge extraction,
where CLDs texts are processed to extract knowledge in form of relevant termi-
nology corresponding to the concepts in the LATO ontology, iii)target-oriented
practices, where knowledge extracted from CLDs can be exploited both for de-
scriptive analysis purposes by classifying CLDs and for predictive usage of CLDs
by enforcing learning procedures.
Ethical issues of different nature and different impact and implications are
involved in processing CLDs using CRIKE. As a general consideration, we ob-
serve that CLDs involve individuals like judges, ascribed/accused people and
possible other individuals intervening in the crime description (e.g., witnesses).
Prominent ethic issues in processing of CLDs should thus avoid: i) violation of
individual privacy as well as prohibited secondary uses of personal data; ii) in-
dividual classification based on data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political
opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, as well as trade union membership,
genetic and biometric data, data concerning health or data concerning sex life or
sexual orientation; iii) unfair of prediction algorithms concerning CLDs analytics
approaches focused not only on pure data analysis, but also on court’s outcomes
prediction, judges profiling and automatic legal decision’s making. For example,
an ethical issue envisaged in [26] is propensity, that is, on the basis of prediction
about what people were likely to do, what could/should be done to prevent. As
discussed in [26], what if big data analytics predict that a certain person has a
likelihood of 95% to being involved in domestic violence? An ethical issue here
has to do with the ethical role of those setting the threshold and the data scien-
tists writing the algorithm that calculates the chance based on the observation
of certain variables available in the underlying dataset.
After describing the overall CRIKE process workflow (Section 2), goal of
the paper is to provide a finer classification of ethical issues involved in the
CRIKE process workflow by referring to the classification introduced in [9] and
its actualization in the framework of the CRIKE (Section 3). Finally, we conclude
by discussing our future work (Section 4).
Law Data Science and Ethics: the CRIKE Approach 3
2 The CRIKE approach to Case-Law Decisions
Processing
The CRIKE approach to CLDs processing is articulated in six main activi-
ties as shown in Figure 1. The Collection of CLDs activity is devoted to the
tasks/procedures used for acquiring and preprocessing CLDs from a qualified
source, like for instance the Court of Milan. Usually, in the Italian context,
CLDs are provided in form of images of the paper documents. The quality of
these documents is highly variable. Thus OCR and other ad hoc solutions for
data cleaning are required to obtain a pure text version of each CLD toghter
with a limited set of metadata (including a CLD identifier and the date). In the
Storage of CLDs activity, digital documents are stored in a database. In CRIKE,
we exploit MongoDB to store for each CLD, the raw text, the available meta-
data, as well as the sentences and single words obtained from sentence and word
tokenization of the raw CLD text.
1 2
Collection of Storage of
CLDs CLDs
3 4
LATO ontology Ontology-based
design knowledge extraction
5 6
CLDs Predictive
classification use of CLDs
Fig. 1. The CRIKE approach to CLDs processing
CRIKE is based on the LATO ontology which drives the process of knowledge
extraction from CLDs. The third activity is the LATO ontology design, with
the goal of conceptualizing legal concepts and related controlled vocabulary.
Then, working with LATO and with the contents of the CLD database, we
extract knowledge from the CLDs (Ontology-based knowledge extraction activity).
Goal of this activity is to retrieve occurrences of the legal concepts as they are
defined in LATO within the CLD document collection and to extract relevant
terminology used by the judge to articulate those concepts in each specific CLD.
Knowledge extracted from CLDs constitutes the input for subsequent activity
of CLDs classification (Fig.1.5). The goal is to classify CLDs according to the
concepts of interest in LATO, to measure the relevance of terms extracted from
CLDs text with respect to LATO concepts, and to associate terminology with
the final decision of the judge. This activity is the basis for calculating a degree
of correlation between terminology, concepts, and decisions. According to this
4 S. Castano et al.
analysis, it is then possible to enforce learning procedures to make a predictive
use of CLDs with respect to specific legal concepts (Predictive use of CLDs). Both
activities 5 and 6 are target-driven in that classification and predictive use of
CLDs are customized according to the final use of CLDs data (e.g., to study
the interpretation given by courts to a specific legal concept, predict a decision
given some facts).
3 Dealing with ethics in CRIKE
To highlight and discuss ethical issues in processing CLDs, we map the data
science ethics framework proposed by Floridi in [9], on the CRIKE activity
workflow resulting in the three-layer framework shown in Fig.2): i) ethics of
data, involving ethical issues related to collection and analysis of large CLDs
dataset; ii) ethics of algorithms, involving ethical issues related to complexity and
autonomy of CRIKE algorithms, and iii) ethics of practices, more strictly related
to ethics in target oriented classification and prediction activities of CRIKE.
SOURCE OF CLDs (Milan Court and Court of Appeal)
1 2
Collection of Storage of ETHICS OF DATA
CLDs CLDs
3 4
LATO ontology Ontology-based ETHICS OF
design knowledge extraction ALGORITHMS
5 6
CLDs Predictive
ETHICS OF
classification use of CLDs
PRACTICES
Fig. 2. Three-layer framework of CRIKE ethical issues
3.1 Ethics of data
Ethics of data primarily refers to the source providing data as well as to the
procedures used for data acquisition and storage. In terms of data acquisition,
working in the legal domain, in particular the Italian legal domain, imposes us
to acquire data from a specific, secure and certified source. Both laws and CLDs
have an institutional creator which should be accessed by directly interacting
with the public administration offices in order to acquire genuine data in terms
of data format and completeness. In CRIKE, we process CLDs obtained directly
by the involved Courts (the Court of Milan and the Court of Appeal). The direct
access to the administration databases guarantees the institutional provenance
Law Data Science and Ethics: the CRIKE Approach 5
of data as well as their integrity. A second relevant issue concerning ethics of data
involves personal data. In particular, criminal CLDs may contain three different
categories of personal data, namely (i) identification data, (ii) special categories
of personal data and (iii) criminal records. Identification data are defined by
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as those data describing an
identifiable person [7]. Special categories of personal data are described at para-
graph 9 of the GDPR as ”those data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political
opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, as well as trade union membership,
genetic and biometric data, data concerning health or data concerning sex life
or sexual orientation”. Criminal records are the records concerning a person’s
criminal history. This last category of personal data is protected at paragraph
10, where GDPR specifies that ”access to those data is permitted only under the
control of an official authority or when the processing is authorized by European
Union or Member State law”. The aim of the regulation is to protect personal
data against illicit handlings. In particular, main ethical issues related to CLDs
acquisition and storage concern the risk associated both to the privacy of groups
of people and to re-identification of individuals. Specifically, the risk associated
with groups regards the possibilities to combine data and groups of individuals,
for example, by committed crime, by race or nationality, by spoken language
or dialect, by age or gender. These activities could violate groups privacy and
could permit re-identification through inference [8]. Concerning re-identification
of individuals, the main risk is to violate the right of being forgotten, as drafted
in [4]. These issues are faced in different research fields. For example, [3] presents
an estimation of re-identification risk for data sharing policies of the Health In-
surance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule, as well as
an evaluation of the risk of a specific re-identification attack using voter reg-
istration lists. In general, uncontrolled re-identification risks can conduct to a
dangerous information control loss and privacy violation, due to the fact that in-
formation privacy concerns specifically the capacity of an individual to maintain
control of his or her information [25]. Since privacy regulation is based on the
notion of meaningful consent, having trust in data acquisition and processing
is a crucial issue [22]. In particular, the topic of privacy in accessing individ-
ual criminal history information is addressed in [12], where the authors define
policies for providing public access to individual criminal records in Spain and
the USA, considering access to court records, protection of honor, privacy and
personal data, free speech and rehabilitation. In this context, CRIKE is com-
pliant with the privacy regulation in that it is conceived to detect exclusively
legal concepts inside the CLDs and to group the CLDs by legal concepts and
their application. Secondly, we want to extract legal knowledge by automatically
considering the verdicts. In other terms, we consider only legal terminology and
crime argumentation. Our goals are not related to personal data, directly or in-
directly. Knowledge extraction and text mining activities are only related to find
legal concepts application and how they are expressed by judges inside various
CLDs. Moreover, due to the particular type of data and the agreement we signed
with the involved Court administrations, our dataset is closed and it cannot be
6 S. Castano et al.
shared nor published. The CLDs database is protected against external attacks,
in that it is stored on stand alone machine accessed only by a restricted number
of authorized researchers with given time restrictions. These restrictions were
mandatory to sign the agreement with the involved public administration of-
fices, for CLDs acquisition and use. We note that our dataset avoids the group
privacy issues in that we obtained a whole set of CLDs, rather than only selected
CLDs targeted to a specific topic/objective to be analysed, like for instance all
CLDs related to a specific crime or to a specific group of crimes.
3.2 Ethics of algorithms
The ethical issues related to design and implementation of algorithms that elab-
orate criminal data are transparency, accountability and discrimination. First, in
terms of transparency, the risk is to use or implement processes and algorithms
that are unclear, incomprehensible and unrepeatable [24]. Transparency is re-
lated to the concepts of accessibility and comprehensibility of information, as
reported in [21, 24]. Real-world algorithmic decision-making processes designed
to maximize fairness and transparency are described in the Open Algorithm
(OPAL) project [15]. Transparency itself is insufficient, on one side, because
companies would not reveal and disseminate proprietary algorithms not to lose
their competitive edge, and on the other side, because of the so-called trans-
parency paradox [19]. This refers to the fact that, it is clear what machine
learning algorithms do in taking decisions about, for example, credit, medical
diagnose, personalized recommendations, advertising or job opportunities, but it
is still less clear how these decisions are taken [23]. This issue is directly related
to accountability, which is the problem of associating the blame for problems
and errors of very complex systems to specific individuals [13, 17].
A further issue to be addressed is how and to whom to enforce accountability
for discriminatory outcomes of data analysis. Handling criminal data means in
fact to face the risk of associating a criminal behavior with groups of individ-
uals on the basis of their race, religion, cultural background, language, age or
gender. An example of data mining discriminatory outcome in ranking job can-
didates is described in [2]. Authors demand caution in the use of data mining
techniques and they advocate that this should be part of a comprehensive set
of strategies for contrasting discrimination in the workplace and for promoting
fair treatment and equality. Other interesting contributions on this issue are the
idea of Classification with No Discrimination (CND) [10] and the proposal of
a guideline for researchers and anti-discrimination data analysts on concepts,
problems, application areas, datasets, methods, and approaches from a multi-
disciplinary perspective, as presented in [20]. A discussion of algorithm fairness
issues on criminal data analysis and racial disparities, in particular focusing on
the problem of designing an algorithm for pretrial release decisions, is given
in [6]. Since CRIKE knowledge extraction enforces an ontology-based approach
with LATO, we comply with the need of transparency in terms of comprehensi-
bility and human intervention. In particular, we decided to base the process of
knowledge extraction mainly on quite simple functionalities for searching LATO
Law Data Science and Ethics: the CRIKE Approach 7
terminology within the CLDs documents in order to guarantee a transparent and
easily repeatable process. We handle CRIKE accountability issues by arguing
that LATO can be changed and modified directly by the designer, to influence
CRIKE results. Moreover, the system is open and still under definition. Our
goal is to preserve human intervention and direct control over the system behav-
ior and over the achieved results. Furthermore, in order to avoid the reported
discriminatory risks, we base knowledge extraction and classification processes
only on general legal concepts and application, by considering for instance crime
paragraph, article, verdict and the related terminology.
3.3 Ethics of practices
The issues concerning the ethics of practices are related to the use of the out-
comes of data analysis. In particular, we need to face risks concerning anonymity
and informed consent, secondary use, and data protection. Informed consent
appears insufficient to solve ethical problems related to individuals privacy as
discussed in [1], where authors point out how privacy and big data are simply in-
compatible without a definition of new approaches having anonymity has one of
their primary goals since the design. In particular, they point out how anonymity
is different from nameless and reachability. About secondary use, the aim is to
ensure ethical practices fostering both the progress of data science and the pro-
tection of the right of individuals and groups, as pointed in [14]. An example
of the question of privacy and secondary use of data in health research is given
in [16] by considering three different levels: informed consent, anonymity, and
public interest mandate. In health research, the reuse of clinical data is a fast-
growing field, recognized as essential to: i) realize the potentials for high-quality
healthcare, ii) improve healthcare management, iii) reduce healthcare costs, and
iv) perform effective clinical research ( [18]). In particular, one of the main issues
in this field is the trade-off between the need of keeping personal data anonymous
and the need of exploiting data to achieve results that could be useful for the cit-
izens, according to the notion of public interest. An example is available in [11],
where authors describe two court cases (appeared in US and UK) about sell-
ing prescription data and the related questions of what constitutes privacy and
what public interest. Balancing privacy, public interest and open access raises
ethical and juridical questions in the legal field as well, because Criminal Courts
declare in their decisions what is forbidden and what is allowed. Thus, accord-
ing to the European Court of Human Rights, criminal argumentation reported
in CLDs has to be published, accessible, and known by individuals. CRIKE’s
results achieved so far are completely anonymized and do not report any per-
sonal or identifying data, because CRIKE works exclusively with legal concepts
formalized in LATO. The CRIKE system has a scientific research aim only and
it respects the GDPR rules for scientific research purposes. We mine CLDs in
order to extract the legal argumentation and the juridical terms application, by
considering the diffusion of the legal knowledge as a positive element. For these
reasons, we aim at facilitating the access to legal knowledge without pursuing
goals of judge profiling or similar.
8 S. Castano et al.
4 Future work
Our work on CRIKE is ongoing. So far, we achieved first and promising results
in automatically extracting and classifying CLDs terminology concerning drug-
related crimes. In particular, we focused on legal abstract terms formalization
in LATO in thus context. In law articles, legal abstract terms represent some-
thing indeterminate that need a concrete application to be defined; examples
of abstract terms are good faith, long-term cohabitation, or minor offense case,
where what should be considered good, long-term, or minor requires a concrete
interpretation by the Court in order to be defined. In this context, we defined a
CRIKE process to detect concrete applications of legal abstract terms in CLDs
and to determine how and where considered legal abstract terms are applied by
judges in their legal argumentation. As discussed in the paper, CRIKE has been
designed from the very beginning to be compliant with guidelines and regula-
tions concerning the ethical issues in the field of data science. Our future work
will keep this as a primary goal of CRIKE. In particular, we aim at evolving
the LATO ontology to include further legal concepts and related terminology by
systematically testing the capability of the system to detect and classify CLDs
against them. Moreover, we aim at exploiting the use of machine learning tech-
niques to automatically enrich LATO starting from the training set composed by
the CLDs that have been classified through the ontology-driven approach, thus
enforcing a bootstrapping mechanism where each cycle of knowledge extraction
and classification is used to improve the ontology and the subsequent extraction
cycle. Finally, we aim at studying the correlation between the concrete appli-
cation of legal abstract terms and the final Court decision, in order to apply a
predictive approach for determining an expected verdict given the concrete facts
that are related to each specific legal concept of interest.
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