Duquesne Kline School of Law named finalist in Bloomberg Law’s 24-25 Law Innovation Program

According to Bloomberg Law, finalists are, “recognized for implementing and leading innovative programs into their curricula that advance new methodologies and approaches to student instruction, technology implementation and usage, experiential learning, and other facets of legal education.”

The ground-breaking Law and Computing Concentration at Duquesne Kline School of Law harnesses the power of modern computing to improve the legal profession and increase access to justice. It enhances the modern lawyer’s repertoire by teaching programming as a modern lawyer may need to use it, with an important focus on justice.

“Duquesne Kline’s Law and Computing Concentration equips students for the changes in the legal profession because of emerging technology. It also provides the opportunity to develop an aptitude in designing legal technology that can ethically and thoughtfully impact our society,” said Dean of the Duquesne Kline School of Law April Barton. 

Students who study this concentration at Duquesne Kline School of Law may study from courses entitled “eDiscovery,”  “Coding for Lawyers” and “Statistics and Machine Learning.” There are also about ten other elective law and technology courses for Duquesne Kline School of Law students to study. 

“We introduce law students to computer programming and computational thinking generally. In the first-year curriculum, we introduce programming techniques in mini-modules to increase students’ computational legal literacy and to alert them to other possible career paths. The new possibilities could involve practice areas in traditional legal jobs, or in the creation of devices that will improve our understanding of the law, decrease the justice gap, or automate the most mundane of legal tasks,” said Wesley Oliver, Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Computing Program at Duquesne Kline School of Law. 

Duquesne Kline School of Law is among a very small group of law schools nationwide offering computer programming courses in the law school, even for those with no prior background in the field. In addition to the courses and concentration currently bring offered, in the Fall of 2025, Duquesne Kline School of Law will pilot a Tech Track with a handful of entering students who wish to integrate programming courses beginning in the first year.