COM, CDS Collaboration Leads to Investigation of Judges for ProPublica, Good Morning America

A collaboration among journalism and data science students at Boston University led to a blockbuster exposé of federal and state supreme court justices for ABC’s Good Morning America and the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica.

Over two years, the students helped scour the records of more than 1,200 judges, both Republican and Democratic appointees, who chose not to recuse themselves when facing potential appearances of impropriety involving major cases intersecting with their family interests.

The investigation was a project of Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab, a collaboration between Boston University’s College of Communication and the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ BU Spark! program.

COM Associate Professor of the Practice of Computational Journalism Brooke Williams co-wrote the story for ProPublica with Noah Pransky (COM’02) and current journalism student Andrew Botolino (COM’25), with research by students Emilia Wisniewski, Serena Ata, Amisha Kumar and Amanda Bang.

“Justice Media co-Lab students, as part of the class (XC410) and paid summer internship program, helped to build a database of judges to shed light on potential conflicts of interest involving spouses and family,” Williams said. “In order to identify potential connections, they combined public datasets such as judicial financial disclosures, court dockets and lobbying records and then dug into documents such as court filings and corporation disclosures.”

Guided by Mark Schifferli, a CDS lecturer who taught the class with Williams, computer science students on the team explored new ways to potentially use data and computational methods to identify potential conflicts of interest among judges — not just federal where others have made good headway — but also judges at the state level, said BU Sparks! Director Ziba Cranmer.

“They built two programs enabling the journalism students to more efficiently find connections in certain court, political and financial records, among other things,” Cranmer said. “The exploration is a key part of the Justice Media co-Lab, and ultimately it will lead to more important projects and tools.” 

Schifferli said the strength of the program lies with its combination of data experience and journalistic curiosity.

“The CDS students on these teams assemble huge datasets and build tools to explore them,” he said, “but to get the story, they tailor the software to the hunches of the journalism students.” 

Added Pransky: “This piece never would have happened without COM and the contribution from all the student journalists. They found needles tucked into complex court haystacks, and helped build the foundation of a story that not just one, but two national outlets wanted to showcase.”