Housing Justice Chatbot-Building Clinic

What do students do in this clinic?

Affordable housing issues are proliferating across the nation. Yet lawyers who help moderate and low-income tenants are few and far between. Chatbots–simple question-answer flowcharts–are emerging as a way of delivering essential legal information. In this course, students will identify and research a pressing housing issue facing a community—if possible, their local community—and will find and collaborate with an organization that is trying to address that issue. Then each student will construct a chatbot that addresses the issue. To build this tool, students will need to learn the law governing their rental housing issue, e.g., remedies for needed repairs, laws governing tenant application fees, return of security deposit, expungement of eviction court records, and the like. Students also will research resources—including, especially, human helpers—for tenants experiencing that housing challenge in the chosen locale.

Students will begin by creating a flowchart reflecting the logic of the law governing the matter before using a software application to develop a chatbot that addresses the housing law concern they have chosen. The final phase of the course will be to vet the chatbot each student has developed with the coaching of faculty. We anticipate that each student will post a chatbot on Canvas, which will allow it to be seen, used as an example, and tested by students, faculty and staff. Some may be deployed on the website of the organization with which they have partnered in identifying the housing topic for the chatbot. The ethics, limits, and possibilities of legal information chatbots will be included in the course readings and discussions.

To register, obtain the one-page application (from the clinic website or from the Clinic Administrator), fill it out, and turn it in to the professors no later than noon the day before registration opens.  The professors will get back to you before registration opens.