G.S. Hans

Gautam Hans is a Clinical Professor of Law and founding Director of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Clinic (CRCLC). CRCLC works on cases and projects relating to a wide range of topics including free speech and association; current issues involving developing technologies; and amicus briefs and policy and advocacy.

An expert on speech, privacy, civil liberties, and technology policy, Professor Hans analyzes, through research and advocacy, how new and developing technologies implicate constitutional law, privacy and data protection, and public policy. Professor Hans also researches and works on issues relating to clinical legal education, with a particular focus on social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In additional to VRCLC, he teaches Professional Responsibility and Critical Theory in Clinical Practice.

A frequent media commenter on privacy, free speech, and surveillance, Professor Hans regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on current issues in technology law, clinical legal education, and free speech. He has served in multiple leadership roles in the national clinical legal education community, including as co-President of the Clinical Legal Education Association and on the board of the Center for Study of Applied Legal Education. In 2024, Professor Hans received the M. Shanara Gilbert Award from the American Association of Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Education.

In addition to his scholarship on free speech, technology law and policy, and clinical legal education, Professor Hans has a robust pro bono amicus practice in state and federal courts focusing on novel issues in free speech, privacy, and technology law. He is also a co-author of the leading Professional Responsibility casebook Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law (7th ed., 2025).

Before joining Cornell Law, Professor Hans served as Associate Clinical Professor of Law and founding director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Stanton Foundation First Amendment Clinic. He completed his clinical teaching fellowship at the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to his academic career, Professor Hans worked at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, CA, for four years, focusing on privacy, free speech, and surveillance law and policy.

Professor Hans earned his J.D., cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School; his M.S. in information policy from the University of Michigan School of Information; and his B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. While in graduate school, he was Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review and served as a student-attorney in the Entrepreneurship Clinic and the Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic. Before entering graduate school, Professor Hans was an editorial assistant in the Knopf Group of Random House.