Learn more about Chaz Arnett, JD, and his groundbreaking course in the latest issue of “CATALYST” magazine.
Chaz Arnett, JD, has been thinking about the intersection of race, technology, and law for a long time.
The Morehouse College and Harvard University law grad who grew up in East Baltimore remembers feeling watched as a boy — surveilled by police who patrolled his community. “I could walk a few blocks and see the neighborhood change as things became whiter. It was a stark reality to me and struck me as a young kid,” he says.
Fast forward 20-plus years, and Arnett’s childhood observations — as well as stints in the public defender’s office in Baltimore and New Orleans — laid the groundwork for the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law’s most recent course, Race, Tech, and the Law, developed by Arnett and taught for the first time during spring 2021.
The innovative class is designed to help students think about how in an increasingly digitized society, important decisions impacting housing, labor, health care, education, and criminal justice are more and more frequently determined by or with the assistance of advancing technologies.
Arnett, an associate professor at Maryland Carey Law, sees his groundbreaking class as filling a gap he’s seen at the law school level. Now in his fifth year of teaching, he acknowledges that there are tech classes being taught in other law schools, mostly focusing on using digital technology to submit motions or conduct research.
“There’s a growing need to focus on another area,” he says, “and that’s looking at the social implications of using technology and how race plays into generating some of those social implications.”
Read more about Arnett and his course at CATALYST magazine.
You can read the Fall 2021 issue of CATALYST magazine, which highlights research on veterans with PTSD training service dogs; a celebration of our new Community Engagement Center; outreach by the School of Social Work’s Positive Schools Center; Diane Forbes Berthoud, PhD, MA, UMB’s first chief equity, diversity, and inclusion officer and vice president; our students returning to in-person learning; and much, much more at https://catalystmag.umaryland.edu/.