Britney Firmin

Who are you? Tell us about yourself!

Hi, my name is Britney Firmin and I’m a 2E at Georgetown Law! I was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.

My family is from Haiti and Jamaica and I have immense pride in the lineage I descend from. Growing up, I was an avid reader, dreamer, and writer. Cooking has brought me closer to my culture and my grandmother, a matriarch whose Haitian cuisine is world famous in my eyes. In high school, I increasingly became drawn to studies of history, race and politics. In college, I found my voice to begin imparting change in the ways that mattered most to me. My prior campaign work and federal government internships empowered to leverage law and policy as a tool for social change.

Now, I love making playlists, learning and trying new recipes, traveling to different countries, and just spending time with my friends and loved ones.

What drew you to Georgetown’s Tech Law Scholars Program?

I was drawn to the Tech Law Scholars Program with intersecting interests in data privacy, race, and consumer protection. With my background working in the federal district court system coordinating jury trials, paired with my current role as Data Analytics Lead at Cambridge Associates, I was drawn to this program so that I’d be able to understand the technology policies that shape data accessibility and innovation. And with opportunity to understand the disparate impacts of these developments on marginalized communities, I was eager to join a cohort that would challenge me to explore the complexities of these issues embedded in the automated systems that power our society. I’m grateful for the guidance and mentorship I’ve received thus far.

Why were you interested in becoming a Fritz Family Fellow? What research do you plan on pursuing as a Fellow?

I first was eager to join a long term research project where I’d be able to lean into legal research on a technology policy related topic outside of the classroom. That opportunity came through the Redesigning the Governance Stack Project. Being a Fritz Family Fellow allows me to pursue my intersecting technology and society interests in support of a tangible project that can impart change and address dilemmas in our existing systems of technology policy. As a fellow for the Redesigning the Governance Stack Project, I’m working with Professors Julie Cohen, Meg Jones, and Paul Ohm conducting research on statutes and legal scholarship that undergird the administrative state, contributing to the Project’s mission of reinventing the administrative state’s governance to better center public values.

Tell us about your work experience before law school! How did these experiences pique your interest in tech law and criminal justice?

Prior to law school I worked in the federal court system coordinating jury trials. That experience exposed me to the operational facets of the criminal justice system and now motivates me to work closely with marginalized communities like my own to generate social change. I hope to learn more about how our digitized carceral state affects people of color to be better equipped to advance social justice in the digital age.

What advice do you have for incoming Georgetown Law students that want to get involved with tech law opportunities?

I’d highly recommend joining the Tech Law Scholars program! It’s a great way to receive mentorship and a community of support as you navigate law school. I knew coming in that I was interested in the tech law space, and I find that through this community I’m able to navigate the various pathways with a clearer vision of where I see myself.

What interests do you have outside of law?

I love cooking and learning new recipes, making playlists, and spending time with my friends and loved ones!

Hoon Kim

Who are you? Tell us about yourself!

My name is Hoon Kim and I am a rising 3L Technology Law and Policy Scholar at Georgetown Law. Before law school, I worked as a data analytics lead at Tripadvisor and as a consultant for Applied Predictive Technologies (now part of Mastercard). I went to Penn for my undergrad degrees in international studies and business and have a master’s in computer science from Boston University. I also served in the South Korean military for two years as an Army interpreter for the Korean Defense Intelligence Command.

What drew you to Georgetown’s Tech Law Scholars Program?

With my technical background as well as my work experience in the e-commerce tech sector, I knew I wanted to continue in technology (or tech-adjacent) law. Georgetown’s Technology Law and Policy Scholars program, with its strong policy and tech programming and location in DC, was the ideal setting to synergize my background with my passion for governance, decision-making, and policy.

You were enrolled in the Technology Impact Lab last spring. What has been your favorite part of your work with the Lab?

The close and candid interactions with the Colorado AG’s on issues where modern, in-market technology meets new developing law such as the Colorado Privacy Act Regulations. It was fascinating to directly hear from the Attorney General’s office their opinions on policy priorities, public harms they are attempting to prevent or remedy, and the ways they deliberated on real world issues.

How has your prior work experience in data analytics connected to your work at the Technology Impact Lab?

My familiarity with e-commerce and database technology as well as my background in coding helped understand and adapt to web tracking and measurement technologies our Lab team used. It was fulfilling to use skills that I had developed elsewhere for studies aiming to benefit and inform the public. Our team specifically analyzed healthcare-adjacent e-commerce companies not covered by HIPAA (e.g., CVS) from a CPA lens, which was very relevant to our team’s personal lives.

What advice do you have for new students at Georgetown Law or students who want to get involved with the Technology Impact Lab?

For Georgetown Law in general, keep an open mind on what areas of the law you are interested in studying as well as practicing. Georgetown’s a big school with a correspondingly rich breadth of learning opportunity. Take advantage of it and take classes you feel curious about as well as those you feel you “need.” For the Lab, don’t let your lack of technical experience deter you. Most of the tech can be learned during the course, while any unique life experiences and perspective you have can make valuable contributions.

What interests do you have outside of law?

I am obsessed with my cat and dog (respectively called Reykjavik and Kona, in Iceland and Hawai’i). I also enjoy various video games, mostly in the strategy and simulation genres. Outside the house, I enjoy skiing and am aiming to train for a half-marathon.

Sean Norick Long

Who are you? Tell us about yourself!

I’m Sean and I’m in the fourth (and final!) year of a joint law and policy program between Georgetown Law and Harvard Kennedy School. Before grad school, I was an antitrust paralegal at the US Department of Justice and then moved to London to join Apolitical, a digital learning platform for policymakers. I’m interested in antitrust, data privacy, and using technology to improve access to justice.

What drew you to Georgetown’s Tech Law Scholars Program?

There is a breadth to the people in the Tech Law Scholars program that you can’t find anywhere else. As an example: During 1L, I met two fellow TLSers, Ashwin Ramaswami and Esther Tetruashvily. Ashwin was a computer science major straight from undergrad, while Esther had served as a US diplomat in Central Asia and China. Together, we wrote a piece for the Georgetown Law Technology Review on how Section 230 might apply to platforms like GitHub and Hugging Face that let users share and collaborate on datasets, AI models, and coding projects. Ashwin and Esther ended up teaching a student-initiated seminar on open source software. TLSers aren’t just your classmates — they’re your friends and future collaborators!

Tell us about your paper that won the Tech Institute’s Writing Competition in 2023! What did you write about and why did this topic interest you?

The paper, “Digital Access to Justice: Automating Court Fee Waivers in Oklahoma,” discusses a tech-enabled approach to address the issue of people being sent to jail for unpaid court debt. In 2016, Oklahoma passed a law that makes formerly incarcerated people eligible for a waiver of their outstanding court fees if they comply with all probation requirements and make payments on their court debt for 24 consecutive months following release. Unfortunately, awareness of this mechanism for debt relief is low and the process to determine eligibility is technical and complicated.

Alongside my co-authors who founded the Fines & Fees Freedom Fund, we created an interactive digital tool for legal aid attorneys that summarizes a person’s outstanding court fees and waiver eligibility in less than one minute. We also web scraped 50,000 court records to quantify an eligible client base statewide. I loved the topic because it is an example of a local problem (we worked with Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma) that has global impact (we can apply the process towards any effort to encode legal rules into digital tools).

As you are also receiving a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard, how do you plan on integrating law and policy into your career?

In my career, I’m excited about using data to inform policy and fill gaps in legal understanding. For example, as a 1L, I learned that the Fourth Amendment requires “reasonable suspicion” for police stops. The professor noted that we lack a precise way to measure how much risk qualifies as reasonable suspicion, but the discussion stopped there. However, in a policy course at Harvard on “Law, Order, and Algorithms,” we investigated the statistics behind reasonable suspicion. Using data from 300,000 police stops in New York City for criminal possession of a weapon, we built a regression model to assess the likelihood of finding a weapon. In 40% of the stops, there was less than a 1% chance of finding a weapon. This led us to ask tough questions, such as: What are the policy implications that a substantial fraction of these stops were conducted based on relatively little evidence? The two degrees together have helped me to interrogate how data illuminates gaps in legal and policy understanding.

What advice do you have for incoming Georgetown Law students that want to get involved with tech law opportunities?

Don’t wait until graduation to work on important problems! My friends Ashwin and Esther are great examples — Ashwin spent his final year of law school running to represent his hometown in the Georgia State Senate, while Esther switched to part-time so she could join a frontier artificial intelligence lab.

What you do can be smaller scale: I took the first iteration of the Technology Impact Lab, where teams of law and policy grad students analyzed computer network traffic to help the Colorado Attorney General’s office understand the real-world impact of its new data privacy law. I highly recommend taking the second iteration next spring. And if you don’t find the perfect tech law course, the student handbook lets you organize a student-initiated seminar (and earn 2 credits doing it!).

What interests do you have outside of law?

I’m a runner and would like to begin training for a triathlon this fall. I also like working with data and usually have a “public interest technology” side project. Currently, that’s working part-time for the Community Economic Defense Project, a nonprofit developing a fully-integrated response to economic hardship — from eviction to predatory debt to non-consensual towing. They just created a new in-house innovation lab and I’m learning ArcGIS to create interactive maps that help visualize eviction data.