I’ve changed my mission statement. The old one read:
I study how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. I try to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research interests include content moderation, digital copyright, generative AI, digital property, and other topics in computer and Internet law.
The new one reads:
I try to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research areas include generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property.
My old statement focused on the policy consequences of legal rules; my new one focuses on the legal rules themselves. To be clear, this is a change in emphasis. I’ve always cared about both policy and law and I expect that I always will. Nor is this a sudden shift in what I’m doing. Instead, I’ve updated the description to catch up with a gradual evolution in how I understand my scholarly contributions.
Still, the difference is real. I care most about getting the analytical parts of technology law right, I enjoy working on it, and I’m good (enough) at it. Anything I might write about technology policy, many other people can do better—but my ideas about technology law itself are weird enough that they simply will not get written unless I do it myself.
To give more of a sense of what my new statement means, let me unpack the invidual phrases, in a kind of Reporter’s Note:
- The critical word is “clarity.” I used to want to be smart. Now I want to be clear. I strive hard for clarity in my work. I try to pare down my models to the provably minimal number of moving parts, to organize my arguments with step-by-step logical rigor, and to describe my ideas in “full, clear, concise, and exact terms.”
- This clarity (hopefully) comes in three forms, of which the first and foremost is “doctrinal” clarity. I’m a “Professor of Law,” and to me what makes law distinctive as a discipline is its comprehensive engagement with doctrine: what is the law on a specific issue? I take doctrine seriously but not literally; I prefer to look past unimportant linguistic variations to the actual rules that the legal system is attempting to establish and apply.
- Second, there is “technical” clarity. Another way of describing my research is that I study issues where “the legal treatment of software depends on the technical details of how that software works.” With a few exceptions, I don’t do novel computer-science scholarship. Instead, I explain the relevant technical ideas for non-technical audiences, as accurately and clearly as I can.
- And third, there is “conceptual” clarity. I read a lot of analytic philosophy, and I try to bring out the underlying conceptual architecture that caselaw is groping towards. I’ve read too much legal realism and history of science to think that concepts alone should determine doctrine. Instead, I think that good concepts are useful; they work because they encapsulate widely shared beliefs about legal rules in a way that can be consistently applied.
- My field of study—“information and Internet law”—may sound broad, but my job title is literally to work on “digital and information law.” Larry Lessig famously argued that Internet law was worth studying because it could “illuminate the entire law.” Today, as computer technologies and the information that passes through them extend ever further into personal, social, and civic life, these fields increasingly are the entire law. The distinction is meaningful, too, because I work extensively on information law (e.g., IP and speech), on Internet law (e.g., platforms like search engines and social media), and on their intersection (e.g., AI and digital property).
- To ground that broad summary, my list of research areas—“generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property”—identifies the major topics that I write on. The list doesn’t include my one-offs, on topics like class actions or research ethics. Instead, it lists the topics on which I have a sustained body of work that I expect to keep working on.
- I work on “foundations” more than on applications. I would rather clean up the threshold issues that every case on an issue raises than analyze a single lawsuit in comprehensive detail. Often, this means nailing down the conceptual question that numerous doctrines are asking, or being precise about how classes of computer systems do or don’t match common legal descriptions of them.
- I say that I “try” to bring clarity because I know that I may not succeed. This is an aspirational statement for myself, not a guarantee of future results.
- Finally, “I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other.” I was trained in both fields, and my origin story involved realizing that despite some mutual suspicion, they have a great deal in common. I want to bridge the gap between them because I think that it will be helpful to both communities. Ultimately, I’m committed to conceptual clarity and to foundations rather than applications because I think it’s the most useful way I can address real-world problems: by giving lawyers and technologists the mutual understanding they need to face their shared challenges.
One reason that I revised my statement is that I realized people were picking up on the wrong words in it. They’d ask me to write or speak about big, sweeping policy issues when there are other scholars who would be better fits. Freedom, wealth, and power matter enormously and are all important to my work, but I’m not an expert on any of them as such, and I’m afraid the old statement gave the misleading impression that I am. I hope the new version gives a better sense of what it is I do, and why.