Author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power
My scholarship has appeared (or will soon appear) in many leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, and the Northwestern University Law Review, among many others. My work has also been published in top peer reviewed journals, including Law & Social Inquiry, Big Data & Society, and the Journal of Business Ethics.
Named a Humanities Center Fellow for 2022-2023 academic year, a competitive, university-wide fellowship to study the role of data, misinformation, and expertise in the law.
Serve on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal, Law & Social Inquiry.
Winner of two competitive grants from the Anti-Monopoly Fund of the Economic Security Project ($30,000 and $15,000) to study misinformation in the law and to develop a new paradigm for privacy governance
Winner of two competitive internal grants at Northeastern University ($50,000 each) to study social surveillance and discrimination on platforms (2021-2023)
Named a Top 50 Thinker of 2020 by Prospect Magazine, alongside Jurgen Habermas, Jacinda Ardern, Olivette Otele, Thomas Piketty, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others (2020).
Appointed by the Chief Judge of the State of New York to the Commission to Reimagine the Future of New York’s Courts, to propose immediate and structural reforms to the court system in light of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020).
Elected Chair of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference, the oldest and largest academic conference in privacy law.
Founded Legally Queer, an educational, activist, and advocacy project about LGBTQ legal history and the importance of a progressive judiciary (2020).
Received $25,000 research grant from the Knight Foundation for research on free speech.
Elected to the American Law Institute (ALI) on July 19, 2019
Only law professor to win nationally competitive Belfer Fellowship ($50,000 grant) for research on technology-driven harassment (2019)
Won Privacy Law Scholars Conference Best Paper Award for second time in three years (2019, 2017)
Won Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award, given annually to 5 scholars worldwide (2019)
Won Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award for second time in four years (2019, 2016)
Testified before the House Judiciary Committee twice on privacy/content moderation (2019)
Advanced Introduction to U.S. Data Privacy Law
Edward Elgar Press (2023)
Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power
Cambridge University Press (2021)
*Named one of five “Best Books About Privacy,” Shepherd, by Daniel Solove, GW Law
*Favorably reviewed in Law & Society Review (2022) by Erika Douglas, Temple University
*Favorably reviewed in JOTWELL (2022) by Paul Ohm, Georgetown University
Privacy as Trust: Information Privacy for an Information Age
(Cambridge University Press 2018)
*Cited in ALI’s Principles of the Law: Data Privacy
*Winner: Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award, 2019, for Best Book by NYLS Faculty
*Finalist: PROSE Award in Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology category
Gender Data in the Automated Administrative State, 124 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW __ (forthcoming 2023)
Forward: Framing Managerialism as an Object of Study and Strategic Displacement, 86 LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS __ (forthcoming 2023) (with Julie Cohen, and co-editor of special issue)
Policing Queer Sexuality, 121 MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW __ (forthcoming 2023)
Manufactured Uncertainty in Constitutional Litigation, 92 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW __ (forthcoming 2023)
Disorderly Content, 97 WASHINGTON LAW REVIEW 907 (2022)
Privacy’s Rights Trap, 117 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW ONLINE 88 (2022)
Privacy, Practice, and Performance, 110 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW 1221 (2022)
Governing Algorithmic Decisions: The Role of Decision Importance and Governance on Perceived Legitimacy,
BIG DATA & SOCIETY (2022) (peer reviewed) (with Kirsten Martin)
Are Algorithmic Decisions Legitimate? The Effect of Process and Outcomes on Perceptions of Legitimacy of AI Decisions,
JOURNAL OF BUSINESS ETHICS (2022) (peer reviewed) (with Kirsten Martin)
Social Norms and the Fourth Amendment, 120 MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW 265 (2021) (w/ Matt Tokson)
The New Privacy Law, 55 U.C. DAVIS LAW REVIEW 19 (2021)
Habit and Performative Privacy, 10 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND REPLY COLLECTIVE 43 (2021) (invited essay)
Outsourcing Privacy Law, 96 NOTRE DAME LAW REVIEW DISCOURSE 194 (2021)
Privacy Law’s False Promise, 97 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW 773 (2020)
*Winner: Best Paper Award at the 2019 Privacy Law Scholars Conference
Data Protection By Design? A Critique of Article 25 of the GDPR, 53 CORNELL INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL 147 (2020)
Past the Privacy Paradox: The Importance of Privacy Changes as a Function of Control and Complexity (with James A. Mourey), 5 JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF CONSUMER RESEARCH 162 (2020) (peer reviewed)
Power, Process, and Automated Decision-Making, 88 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW 613 (2019)
Safe Social Spaces, 96 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW 1537 (2019)
Cognitive Biases, Dark Patterns, and the “Privacy Paradox”, 31 CURRENT OPINION IN PSYCHOLOGY 105 (2019) (peer reviewed)
Law, Privacy, and Online Dating: “Revenge Porn” in Gay Online Communities, 44 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY 987 (2019) (peer reviewed)
*Honored as the Deirdre G. Martin Memorial Lecture on Privacy, University of Ottawa
Designing Without Privacy, 55 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW 659 (2018)
*Winner of the 2019 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award
*Winner of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Award for Best Paper at the 2017 Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC)
*Finalist for the American Sociological Association 2019 Star-Nelkin Paper Award (winner announced Aug. 10, 2019)
A Statistical Analysis of Privacy Policy Design, 93 NOTRE DAME LAW REVIEW ONLINE 159 (2018)
The Marketplace of Fake News, 20 PENNSYLVANIA JOURNAL OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 845 (2018)
Are Anti-Bullying Laws Effective?, 103 CORNELL LAW REVIEW ONLINE 135 (2018)
Privacy, Notice, and Design, 21 STANFORD TECHNOLOGY LAW REVIEW 74 (2018)
A Breach of Trust: Fighting “Revenge Porn”, 102 IOWA LAW REVIEW 709 (2017)
Trust: A Model for Disclosure in Patent Law, 92 INDIANA LAW JOURNAL 557 (2017)
Triggering Tinker: Student Speech in the Age of Cyberharassment, 71 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW 427 (2017)
Privacy, Sharing, and Trust: The Facebook Study, 67 CASE WESTERN RESERVE LAW REVIEW 193 (2016)
Manipulating Trust on Facebook, 29 LOY. CONSUMER L. REV. 175 (2016)
Amplifying Abuse: The Fusion of Cyberharassment and Discrimination, BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW ANNEX (Oct. 2015)
Privacy As Trust: Sharing Personal Information in a Networked World, 69 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW 559 (2015)
*Winner of the Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award, 2016
Marriage Rights and the Good Life, 64 HASTINGS LAW JOURNAL 739 (2013)
All Those Like You: Identity, Aggression, and Student Speech, 77 MISSOURI LAW REVIEW 563 (2013)
Tormented: Anti-Gay Bullying in Schools, 84 TEMPLE LAW REVIEW 385 (2012)
Policing Queer Sexuality: A review of Anna Lvovsky’s book, Vice Patrol, extending Professor Lvovsky’s analysis of how police conceptualized their expertise on matters of queer sexuality to novel contexts: sexual content moderation online and misinformation in constitutional litigation.
Manufactured Uncertainty in Constitutional Litigation: Identifies patterns in fact-intensive constitutional litigation, from LGBTQ+ rights to abortion, demonstrating that judicial recasting of the tiers of scrutiny tests contributes to the legitimization and laundering of misinformation through law, harming marginalized populations as a result.
Gender Data and the Automated Administrative State: This Article argues that law mandates, fosters, and incentivizes a certain kind of automation that binarizes gender data, harming gender diverse populations. It challenges the two major strands of scholarship on the automated state: one suggesting that automation and its harms arise in a legal void and one focused on legal responses to automation. Through a case study of how the law creates binary gender data pathways throughout the government’s data ecosystem, this Article makes us rethink the administrative state’s reliance on discretion, expertise, and assumptions about the value of data.
The Gender Box: Heterogeneity and Inclusivity in State Collection of Sex and Gender Data (revise and resubmit, peer review): This Article is a quantitative analysis of sex/gender questions on a novel data set of 7000+ state government forms. Using computational methods, I scraped over 50,000 publicly available documents from websites of all 50 states and the District of Columbia and coded for each element of forms’ gender questions. Using both manual/axial coding methods and statistical analysis, I demonstrate the high levels of chaos and inconsistencies among gender boxes, whether across states, within states, within departments, within programs, and even within the same form.
Opening the Gender Box (under consideration, peer review): Based on over 150 FOIA requests as well as qualitative interviews with front-line workers involved in form design, this Article challenges current scholarship suggesting that sex/gender data collection practices are products of transphobia, the formal law, or agency missions. Rather, I demonstrate that the gender box is chaotic and inconsistent because the social pressures affecting front-line, street-level bureaucratic work are chaotic and inconsistent. This is the first study of state sex and gender data collection to learn from the perspectives of those responsible for putting the law into practice.
Industry Unbound exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on four years of fieldwork, interviews with scores of tech employees, and reviews of internal documents outlining corporate strategies, I show that companies don’t just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how we use their data-extractive products. In contrast to those who claim that privacy law is getting stronger, I show why recent shifts in privacy law are precisely the kinds of changes that corporations want and how even those who think of themselves as privacy advocates often unwittingly facilitate corporate malfeasance.
Privacy as Trust argues that information shared in relationships of trust should be protected by law as private. This book, which is based on my dissertation in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, argues that most privacy scholarship presumes as individualistic, atomistic understanding of privacy: me against the world. Whether that’s to separate or retreat or establish one’s own autonomy, privacy has usually be conceptualized as an individual right. But privacy only makes sense as a social value; we only need privacy when others are around. Privacy As Trust relies on social theory to argue that trust—a resource of social capital—should define how courts determine whether information shared to one or a few people still remains private under the law.
