The JSW Centre for the Future of Law at NLSIU is organising an online presentation by Rebecca Williams, Professor of Public Law and Criminal Law at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. The talk on ‘The HP Sauce Problem: Social Scoring And The Law’s Response’ will be held on January 30, 2026, at 4:00 PM IST.

The discussion is part of our series of presentations on contemporary scholarship by leading academics. This is an online presentation open to all, register here if you would like to attend.

Abstract

While much attention has been given to questions of algorithmic fairness in terms of bias, relatively little attention has been given to broader aspects of fairness including the use of data from one context to reach decisions in another. The increasing ability of big data to reveal connections between apparently unrelated data points has resulted in various regulatory and legislative initiatives to control the use of such connections. This paper argues that these initiatives are so far too vague to provide guardrails in specific instances, but also that they fall wide of the mark. Instead, the paper proposes a new framework to guide generalised or predictive decision-making in its application to individuals.