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<!doctype html>
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<title>FAQ - AI for Scaling Legal Reform</title>
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<strong>AI for Scaling Legal Reform</strong>
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<h1 class="title is-2 has-text-centered">Frequently Asked Questions</h1>
<div class="content">
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">What are racially restrictive covenants?</h3>
<p>
Racially restrictive covenants are discriminatory clauses that
prohibited the purchase, lease, or occupation of land based on
race. Racial covenants originated in the mid-19th century, but
became more prevalent after the Supreme Court held racial zoning
unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). Instead, homeowners
turned to private transactions and racial covenants as a way to
protect property values and maintain racial homogeneity within
their communities. Although declared unenforceable by the United
States Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and illegal
under the Fair Housing Act (1968), such covenants continue to
exist in the pages of real property records across the nation.
</p>
</div>
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">What is California's AB 1466?</h3>
<p>
California enacted legislation in 2021 (<a
href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB1466"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>AB 1466</a
>) that mandates that counties redact racially restrictive deed
covenants. Each county must develop an implementation plan to
identify and redact such records. For a county like Santa Clara,
this involves a substantial effort to potentially examine 24
million deed documents, spanning 84 million pages, dating back to
the 1850s.
</p>
<p>
Prior to AB 1466, individual homeowners could petition for legal
review of covenants, but as in other jurisdictions putting the
onus on homeowners, few individuals did so.
</p>
<p>
In other areas, groups have crowdsourced the identification of
racial covenants, with thousands of volunteers reading over deed
records (see
<a
href="https://www.nationalcovenantsresearchcoalition.com/"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>National Covenants Research Coalition</a
>). Such initiatives are great for involving community members,
but infeasible in jurisdictions lacking that kind of volunteer
base.
</p>
</div>
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">
How did Stanford RegLab and Santa Clara County collaborate?
</h3>
<p>
Stanford
<a
href="https://reglab.stanford.edu/"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>RegLab</a
>
and the
<a
href="https://clerkrecorder.sccgov.org/home"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder's Office</a
>
collaborated to explore the use of machine learning to solve this
challenging search task. RegLab amassed a training dataset drawn
from eight counties across the United States, developed and
fine-tuned a large language model to detect racial covenants, and
created a registry to map these covenants in the county. The
collaboration saved some 86,500 person hours that would have been
required for manual review of records and the model will be made
available for free for any jurisdiction and research team to use.
</p>
<p>
With 57 other counties in California working on the implementation
of AB 1466 and some dozen states enacting reform around racial
covenants, the model can dramatically lower the cost of
identifying such provisions.
</p>
</div>
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">
Why does identifying racial covenants matter?
</h3>
<p>
California mandated this kind of review because of the significant
stigmatic harm that can come from racial covenants in the public
record, a large number of which employ racial epithets. Professors
Richard Brooks and Carol Rose also argue in a leading
<a
href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674072541"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>book</a
>
that the effect of racial covenants persists due to what they
signal. In 2002, for instance, a man in Richmond VA refused to
sell his home to an African American woman, pointing to the racial
covenant. Even if unenforceable, those words can serve as a signal
of the type of community.
</p>
<p>
A historical accounting also informs prospective efforts at fair
housing. The study shows that just a small number of developers
were responsible for close to a third of racial covenants. Joseph
Eichler, who famously built ~2700 homes in Palo Alto, however,
firmly resisted such covenants, and this shows the power of a
small number of actors in influencing integration and fair
housing.
</p>
</div>
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">
What other areas of legal reform are like this?
</h3>
<p>
The study demonstrates the power of language models to assist in
legal reform. Reform efforts often run into the complexity of
language littered across codes, regulations, and records. The
project demonstrates a path to using technology to aid in such
efforts. To provide an example other than racial covenants,
consider
<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/03/unrequired-reading/?itid=lk_inline_manual_1"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>Congressionally mandated reports</a
>
that agencies have to complete. The number has ballooned over
time, but it's difficult to count such reports across U.S.
Code, let alone determine which ones are ripe for sunsetting. The
power of language models can help identify, catalog, and
streamline otherwise opaque requirements that can waste government
resources. As the team demonstrated with racial covenants, this
can be done with rigorous evaluation, testing, adaptation and
legal oversight.
</p>
</div>
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">
What are the implications for technology and government?
</h3>
<p>
Academic-agency
<a
href="https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/CA-Senate-Hearing.pdf"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>partnerships</a
>
provide an alternative path for responsible AI integration. The
project demonstrates the substantial
<a
href="https://crfm.stanford.edu/open-fms/paper.pdf"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
>value of open innovation</a
>. The cost of the open model is less than 2% the cost of a
comparable proprietary model and the model will be freely
available for other jurisdictions to use.
</p>
</div>
<div class="faq-item">
<h3 class="title is-4">
This is great! How can I do this too?
</h3>
<p>
If you are a jurisdiction or a party with access to deed records and are interested in carrying out a similar project with our system, please feel free to reach out to us at reglab [at] law [dot] stanford [dot] edu. We are not able to respond to all inbounds, but it is particularly helpful if you can let us know who you are, what jurisdiction you are interested in, and what deed record data is available.
We've also made available our trained model for racial covenant detection on <a href="https://huggingface.co/reglab-rrc/mistral-rrc">HuggingFace</a>.
</p>
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