Frank Pasquale

Frank Pasquale, an internationally recognized expert on law and technology, will join the Law School as its third full-time faculty member at Cornell Tech on July 1.

Pasquale’s books include The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015), one of the most influential works on information law published in the past decade, and New Laws of Robotics (Harvard University Press, 2020). His work on the law and policy of artificial intelligence and machine learning has been widely cited and translated internationally. He has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Transparent Data Mining for Big and Small Data (Springer-Verlag, 2017).

After earning a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University, Pasquale was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. Upon graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the First Circuit Court of Appeals, and then was as an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. His subsequent academic career has included chaired professorships at the University of Maryland, Seton Hall University, and Brooklyn Law School. He has also served as a distinguished visiting faculty member at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, visiting professor at Yale Law School, and visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. A participant in several international initiatives to better understand AI’s role in society, he is partner investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society.

At Cornell Tech, Pasquale will teach courses on AI law and policy, health law, and internet law, while continuing research on the promise and limits of computation in social contexts. For an upcoming project on “the digitization of judgment,” he is exploring the role of algorithms in society, including in employee monitoring, medical triage decisions, and finance. In a book project, Pasquale is focusing on the implications of new data sources about human behavior. He will also continue his research on the regulation of generative AI, affective computing, and legal automation.

“Frank’s work is on the cutting edge of legal scholarship” says Jens David Ohlin, Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law. “Technology, information, and artificial intelligence are rewriting the rules of law, business, and society, and I can think of no one better than Frank to be our guide during the mind-bending transformations that we are witnessing. And our students will be equally inspired and better prepared because of Frank’s instruction and mentorship.”

“It’s been an intellectually exhilarating experience,” say Pasquale, describing the interview process at Cornell Law and Cornell Tech. “Both campuses felt really vibrant. I had fascinating conversations with colleagues from law, business, computer science, and social science. And I’m really excited to help our students think critically and constructively about how technology shapes our lives.”