July 2023- August 2024
Daniel L. Chen is the Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and the founder of oTree Open Source Research Foundation and the Data Science Justice Collaboratory.
He received his B.A. (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and M.S. from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and Economics; completed his Economics Ph.D. from MIT; and obtained a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Chen uses his extensive empirical training to tackle longstanding legal questions previously difficult to empirically analyze. He has attained prominence through the development of open source tools to study human behavior and through large-scale empirical studies – data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning – on the relationship between law, social norms, and the enforcement of legal norms, and on judicial systems.
Chen will work on his project “Laissez-Fair Racism: Evidence from U.S. Judges,” with coauthor Eric Reinhart (Northwestern University) during his time at the ABF. This project will examine hierarchy and race in the reproduction of racial disparities and the judicial super-ego.