Cecelia Klingele, on judges using software that measures criminal defendants’ risk of reoffending in their sentencing decisions:
“We know that on average, these algorithmic tools tend to make better risk predictions than people do. People tend to overestimate risk. And so these can be a nice check against those natural intuitive biases that we have … but the purposes of sentencing are much broader than predicting future risk of reconviction. When we just look at the risk tool itself, there are a lot of potential misuses that flow primarily from misunderstanding what it does.”
Inside Track, State Bar of Wisconsin
Alta Charo, on the National Academy of Sciences Panel that she co-chaired, and public concerns over that panel’s limited endorsement of human gene editing:
“You hear people talking about how this will make us treat children as commodities and make people more intolerant of people with disabilities and lead to eugenics and all that. While I appreciate the fear, I think we need to realize that with every technology we have had these fears, and they haven’t been realized.”
Sarah Davis, on the importance of reducing the stigma of mental health challenges during law school:
“Physical health and mental health are interconnected, and the sooner we obliterate these artificial distinctions, bust the stigma attached to mental health,
and prioritize health individually and collectively, the healthier we will be.”