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.