Professors Ignacio Cofone and Katherine Strandburg
Spring 2025
Thursdays 4:45-6:45pm Vanderbilt Hall, Room 208
LW.10930
3 credits
The Colloquium on Innovation Policy focuses each year on different aspects of the law’s role in promoting creativity, invention, and new technology. This year, we will discuss the theoretical and practical challenges at the intersection of the regulation of data privacy (or data protection) and artificial intelligence, with attention to the current global sociotechnical situation.
Schedule of Presenters
Thursday, JANUARY 23
Talia Gillis, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
"Price Discrimination" Discrimination
Abstract: Credit price personalization, where lenders set prices based on individual borrower and loan characteristics, is a common practice across many loan types. And conventional accounts of its harms focus on the ways in which risk-based pricing, or setting prices based on borrowers’ credit risk, can lead to disparities for protected groups like racial minorities and women. This Article examines an often-overlooked yet potentially harmful form of price personalization—charging borrowers different rates based on their willingness-to-pay, known as price discrimination—and argues that this practice can exploit vulnerable borrowers, including protected groups like racial minorities and women, by imposing higher costs unrelated to their credit risk, resulting in what I term “price discrimination” discrimination. Beyond entrenching financial disparities, price discrimination can exacerbate default risks, especially as the use of big data and artificial intelligence can make price discrimination more pervasive. Despite the potential risks of price discrimination for protected groups, the existing discrimination legal framework treats price discrimination categorically, as either entirely permissible or entirely impermissible, without providing clear or consistent criteria for when such practices are justified. In contrast, I propose a harm-based approach to addressing price discrimination discrimination, which evaluates the permissibility of pricing policies based on the extent of harm they cause. This approach considers two key factors: the magnitude of the disparities and the legitimacy of the pricing strategy. Focusing on these dimensions offers a more direct approach to addressing price discrimination concerns and aligns with the statutory framework prohibiting unfair, deceptive, and abusive acts or practices.
Thursday, JANUARY 30
Ignacio Cofone, Professor of Law and Regulation of AI, The Faculty of Law, University of Oxford; Visiting NYU School of Law Spring 2025
The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy
Abstract: Our privacy is besieged by tech companies. Companies can do this because our laws are built on outdated ideas that trap lawmakers, regulators, and courts into wrong assumptions about privacy, resulting in ineffective protections to one of the most pressing concerns of our generation. Drawing on behavioral science, sociology, and economics, Ignacio Cofone challenges existing laws and reform proposals, and dispels enduring misconceptions about data-driven interactions. This exploration offers readers a holistic view of why current laws and regulations fail to protect us against corporate digital harms, particularly those created by AI. Cofone proposes a better response: meaningful accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices, which ultimately entails creating a new type of liability that recognizes the value of privacy.
Thursday, FEBRUARY 6
Julie Cohen, Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology, Georgetown Law
Oligarchy, State, and Cryptopia
Abstract: Theoretical accounts of power in networked digital environments typically do not give systematic attention to the phenomenon of oligarchy—to extreme concentrations of material wealth deployed to obtain and protect durable personal advantage. The biggest technology platform companies are dominated to a singular extent by a small group of very powerful and extremely wealthy men who have played uniquely influential roles in structuring technological development in particular ways that align with their personal beliefs and who now wield unprecedented informational, sociotechnical, and political power. Developing an account of oligarchy and, more specifically, of tech oligarchy within contemporary political economy therefore has become a project of considerable urgency. This essay undertakes that project. As I will show, tech oligarchs’ power derives partly from legal entrepreneurship related to corporate governance and partly from the infrastructural character of the functions the largest technology platform firms (and through them, their oligarchic leaders) now perform. This account of tech oligarchy has important implications for three large categories of hotly debated issues. First, it sheds new light on the much-remarked inability of nation states to govern giant technology platform firms effectively. Second, it explains why efforts to rebalance the scales by recoding networked digital environments for decentralization—using means such as cryptocurrencies, decentralized social media protocols, and so-called digital autonomous organizations designed to devolve decision making authority—have not produced and will not produce the utopian results their backers promise. Third, it counsels more careful attention to an array of oligarchic projects—from dreams of space colonization to genome editing to the quest to develop artificial general intelligence—that have struck many observers as fantastical. The projects may or may not pan out, but through them, tech oligarchs are working to dismantle existing forms of social and political organization and define a human future that they alone control.
Thursday, FEBRUARY 13
James Grimmelmann, Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law, Cornell Tech
Wednesday, MARCH 5 (2:35-4:35pm Furman Hall Room 212)
Jeremias Adams-Prassl, Professor of Law, Magdalen College, The Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
Thursday, MARCH 6
Omri Ben-Shahar, Leo and Eileen Herzel Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School
Privacy Protection, At What Cost?
Thursday, APRIL 3
Alexander Feder Cooper, Postdoctoral Researcher, Microsoft Research
Thursday, APRIL 10
Anita Allen, Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Questions about the Colloquium should be addressed to Nicole Arzt. Email if you plan to attend any of the talks.