research

Citizenship Under the Plan: Managing Migrant Worker Inclusion in Late Soviet Moscow. Jeffrey Bilik.

What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late 20th century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist and capitalist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the 20th century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant “limit” worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even where the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring base-line productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted migrants’ material conditions at the dormitory for individual assessments of moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.

Forthcoming, Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Code-ifying the Law: How Disciplinary Divides Afflict the Development of Legal Software. Nel Escher, Jeffrey Bilik, Nikola Banovic, and Ben Green.

Proponents of legal automation believe that translating the law into code can improve the legal system. However, research and reporting suggest that legal software systems often contain flawed translations of the law, resulting in serious harms such as terminating children’s healthcare and charging innocent people with fraud. Efforts to identify and contest these mistranslations after they arise treat the symptoms of the problem, but fail to prevent them from emerging. Meanwhile, existing recommendations to improve the development of legal software remain untested, as there is little empirical evidence about the translation process itself. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of fifteen teams—nine composed of only computer scientists and six of computer scientists and legal experts—as they attempt to translate a bankruptcy statute into software. Through an interpretative qualitative analysis, we characterize a significant epistemic divide between computer science and law and demonstrate that this divide contributes to errors, misunderstandings, and policy distortions in the development of legal software. Even when development teams included legal experts, communication breakdowns meant that the resulting tools predominantly presented incorrect legal advice and adopted inappropriately harsh legal standards. Study participants did not recognize the errors in the tools they created. We encourage policymakers and researchers to approach legal software with greater skepticism, as the disciplinary divide between computer science and law creates an endemic source of error and mistranslation in the production of legal software.

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2, Article 398 (November 2024), 37 pages.