
Marie Wako
Marie Wako is a JSD candidate at Stanford Law School. Her research focuses on the empirical analysis of criminal law, examining issues of gender and racial discrimination in courtrooms, and integrates computational methods to explore these themes. She also maintains an interest in international trade law.Marie’s current work applies natural language processing techniques to analyze courtroom language for patterns of implicit racial bias. She aims to uncover how linguistic portrayals of defendants and victims influence judicial decision-making, with the goal of informing more equitable practices in the justice system. Her other research investigates the impact of female judges on sentencing outcomes in Japan’s male-dominated judiciary. Marie holds an LL.M. from Stanford, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and earned her J.D. (cum laude) and LL.B. from the University of Tokyo. Before her doctoral studies, she practiced law in Tokyo, advising private companies and government agencies on matters such as export controls, economic sanctions, and treaty negotiations.
Project Description
My project focuses on how language used in criminal courtrooms can reflect and reinforce racial and gender biases, using NLP analysis. The first prong examines how defendants are portrayed in criminal trial proceedings, identifying racialized language patterns such as negative adjectives or metaphors that may contribute to bias against defendants of color and impact jury decisions. The second prong focuses on how rape victims are portrayed during trials. We will identify victim-blaming language used to portray the "perfect rape victim".