Program on Law & Innovation
Vanderbilt AI Law Lab
The mission of the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL) is to harness AI to expand access to legal services and knowledge and improve the delivery of legal services. Its objectives include training students to navigate an AI-driven landscape, pioneering ethical applications of the technology, and forging partnerships between academia, industry, and the legal community to bring projects to life.
VAILL plans to build coursework focused on both applications within the law and technological skill-building, with help from thought leaders across Vanderbilt, including Jules White, Associate Dean for Strategic Learning Programs and Associate Professor of Computer Science, as well as off-campus partners like John Nay, a Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt and a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
The Music City Legal Hackers work at the intersection of law, technology, and the public interest to deploy technology in innovative ways to meet legal service needs.
The group, affiliated with a global network, brings together law students, academics, practicing lawyers, and other disciplines to explore how social concerns can be addressed through innovative approaches to the delivery of legal services. Vanderbilt Law students participate in regular "hackathons," creating solutions to pressing legal needs in the Nashville community.
Following the phenomenon of Bitcoin, businesses, and lawyers are beginning to explore the unique technology on which it was built. Blockchain, a distributed ledger platform, is a secure, transparent, virtually instant and verifiable technology that can be used to support many kinds of transactions without much of the costly intervention of numerous intermediaries which reduce the value of the transaction. These "smart contracts" or "intelligent transactions" can literally execute themselves.
The Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Law brings together academics and practitioners working in one or both of two themes—AI for Law, which explores how AI will be deployed in legal research and practice; and Law for AI, focused on the legal, policy, and ethical issues that the deployment of AI in society is likely to create. Each year’s workshop includes some of the nation’s most thoughtful experts and thinkers in both spaces.
The PoLI Institute
The PoLI Institute represents a natural evolution of Vanderbilt Law's Program on Law & Innovation (PoLI), launched in 2015 under the leadership and vision of Dean Chris Guthrie. PoLI's mission is to equip Vanderbilt students with the modern skills and tools to navigate an ever-rapidly changing legal landscape — and position them to lead this change.
With the PoLI Institute, we're expanding the scope of the PoLI curriculum and bringing it to practicing legal professionals.
Have Questions?
Email the Program on Law & Innovation coordinator.