People
Faculty Fellows
Helen Nissenbaum
Coordinator
Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum’s research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, and facial recognition technology. Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Barton Beebe joined NYU School of Law in the Fall 2009 from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Barton Beebe received the Class of 2007 Award for Best Professor. Prior to joining Cardozo’s faculty, he clerked for Judge Denise Cote of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. Professor Beebe received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and an articles editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, his Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he was a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, and his B.A. from the University of Chicago (Phi Beta Kappa). In 2007, Professor Beebe served as a Special Master, with Professor Daniel J. Capra, in Louis Vuitton Malletier v. Dooney & Bourke, Inc., No. 04 Civ. 2990 (SAS) (S.D.N.Y.). Professor Beebe’s teaching and scholarship focuses on intellectual property law.
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler ’01 teaches Contracts, Commercial Law, and Topics in E-Commerce. Her expertise is on online contracting in general and software licensing in particular. Her published research has addressed online standard form contracting with delayed disclosure; contracting in the presence of seller market power; and, online dispute resolution clauses including arbitration. Her current research documents the extremely low readership rate of standard form contracts by consumers and discusses implications for regulation of standard terms. Professor Marotta-Wurgler earned a B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, and a J.D., cum laude, from the NYU School of Law, where she was a Robert McKay Scholar and winner of the Daniel G. Collins Prize for Excellence in Contract Law. Before joining the faculty she was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, a Corporate Fellow at the Center for Corporate, Securities, and Financial Law at Fordham University School of Law, and a Leonard Wagner Fellow in Law and Business at the Pollack Center for Law and Business at NYU Law and Stern School of Business.
Erin Murphy joined the NYU faculty in 2010 from UC Berkeley School of Law. Her research explores issues related to technology, state power, and the criminal justice system, with a particular emphasis on street crime. Murphy has written extensively in the area of forensic DNA typing, most recently in Relative Doubt: Familial Searches of DNA Evidence (Michigan Law Review, forthcoming), and has co-authored work at the intersection of law and science with Dr. Montgomery Slatkin and Dr. Yun Song. Murphy's article Paradigms of Restraint (Duke Law Journal) won the AALS Criminal Justice Section 2008 award for best paper by a junior scholar, and her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. Murphy teaches courses related to criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence. She is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, where she served as notes editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a former clerk to the Honorable Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Murphy practiced for five years as an attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented clients in felony and misdemeanor cases in jury and bench trials, argued before the D.C. Court of Appeals, and led a widely watched constitutional challenge to the District of Columbia’s firearms law.
Samuel J. Rascoff joined the NYU School of Law faculty in June 2008. He came to the Law School from the New York City Police Department, where, as Director of Intelligence Analysis, he created and led a team responsible for assessing the terrorist threat to the city. A graduate of Harvard (summa cum laude), Oxford (First Class Honors), and Yale Law School, he previously served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was also a special assistant with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. As an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, his practice focused on the settlement of complex litigation. Rascoff teaches and writes in the areas of national security law, counterterrorism, and regulatory law and policy. His recent publications include Domesticating Intelligence (So. Cal. L. Rev.) and The Law of Homegrown (Counter) Terrorism (Tex. L. Rev.). Named a Carnegie Scholar in 2009, Rascoff’s current research focuses on understanding “Official Islam.”
Ira Rubinstein
In residence Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Spring 2011, Spring 2012
Ira Rubinstein is a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute. His research interests include Internet privacy, electronic surveillance law, online identity, and Internet security. Rubinstein lectures and publishes widely on issues of privacy and security and has testified before Congress on these topics on several occasions. In September 2009, he organized a conference at the law school on Federal Privacy Legislation, and he participated in the December 2009 Federal Trade Commission Roundtable: Exploring Privacy. In July 2010, he testified at a hearing on a new privacy bill, H.R. 5777, the Best Practices Act, before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. In 2011, he was awarded a research grant to explore regulatory issues related to “privacy by design.” He discussed his paper Regulating Privacy by Design at a 2011 Boalt Hall Law School symposium on Technology: Transforming the Regulatory Endeavor, and his paper will be published in the Symposium Issue of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2012). Most recently, he co-authored, with Professor Dennis Hirsch, a paper entitled Better Safe than Sorry: Designing Effective Safe Harbor Programs for Consumer Privacy Legislation. Other recent publications include Privacy and Regulatory Innovation: Moving Beyond Voluntary Codes, 6 I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 356 (2011), which was selected by the Future of Privacy Forum in their best “Privacy Papers for Policy Makers” competition, and Data Mining and Internet Profiling: Emerging Regulatory and Technological Approaches, co-authored with Ron Lee and Paul Schwartz, 75 U. Chi. L. Rev. 261 (2008). Prior to joining the ILI, Rubinstein spent 17 years in Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs department, most recently as Associate General Counsel in charge of the Regulatory Affairs and Public Policy group. Before coming to Microsoft, he was in private practice in Seattle, specializing in immigration law. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1985. From 1998-2001, Rubinstein served on the President's Export Council, Subcommittee on Encryption. He has also served on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine. In 2010, he joined the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology. He was a Board member of the Seattle Public Library Foundation from 2006-2011 and previously served on the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and as a Trustee of the American Immigration Lawyers Foundation.
Katherine Strandburg joined NYU School of Law in the Fall 2009 from DePaul University College of Law. A distinguished intellectual property scholar, Kathy’s research interests are in patent law, science and technology policy, law and network science, social norm theory, and information privacy law. Trained as a physicist, Kathy’s scholarship is informed by her experience as a research scientist and her interdisciplinary perspective. Before embarking on a legal career, Kathy received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon from 1984 to 1987. She also conducted research with the Condensed Matter Theory Group at Argonne National Laboratory from 1987 to 1992, and was a visiting faculty member of the physics department at Northwestern University from 1990 to 1992. Kathy earned her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 1995 and clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Diane Zimmerman
Diane Leenheer Zimmerman is the Samuel Tilden Professor of Law Emerita at NYU School of Law. An award-winning reporter for Newsweek and the New York Daily News, Diane Zimmerman left journalism to pursue a career in the law. In 1977, after graduating from Columbia Law School and clerking for Judge Jack B. Weinstein in the Eastern District of New York, she joined the faculty at New York University School of Law. Issues of civil liberties—particularly women’s rights, and freedom of speech and conscience—propelled Zimmerman from journalism into law, and she has taught, lectured, and written extensively on all of these subjects. Her other major area of academic specialization is intellectual property. Outside activities include chairing the First Amendment Rights Committee of the American Bar Association for five years. She has also chaired the Civil Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and served on its Copyright, Professional Ethics, Communications and Media Law Committees. In the field of intellectual property, Zimmerman serves on the executive committee of the Copyright Society’s board of trustees. She is a member of the editorial board of the Society’s Journal as well as that of the Communication Law and Policy Journal. Professor Zimmerman has been an expert witness for the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate, and a member of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Working Group on Women, Censorship and Pornography. The Second Circuit appointed Zimmerman Reporter for the Gender Committee of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness.
Research Fellows
Roger Ford
Roger Ford is a Research Fellow at the Information Law Institute for 2011–12. His research interests include information privacy, intellectual property, property, antitrust, and criminal law and procedure, with a particular emphasis on how these areas of law are affected by changing technology. He is the author of Modeling the Effects of Peremptory Challenges on Jury Selection and Jury Verdicts, 17 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 377 (2010), and Preemption of State Spam Laws by the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, 72 U. Chi. L. Rev. 355 (2005). Roger received an S.B. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 and a J.D., with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School in 2005, where he was a member of the Law Review, was an MVP2 Fellow in Law and Technology in the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After law school he clerked for Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, practiced intellectual-property and privacy law at Covington & Burling LLP, and taught federal courts as an adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall is a postdoctoral research fellow working under Helen Nissenbaum at New York University's department of Media, Culture and Communication. Hall received his Ph.D. in information systems from the Berkeley School of Information in 2008. His Ph.D. thesis used electronic voting as a critical case study in digital government transparency and his postdoctoral work immediately afterward developed techniques to increase the efficiency and usability of accountability mechanisms in electronic elections. His current work focuses on policy mechanisms that promote trustworthiness and transparency in information systems, as core functions of society and government become networked and computerized. During 2011-2012, Hall is working with the HHS SHARPS team to investigate privacy and security policy implications of health information technology (HIT). Hall holds master's degrees in astrophysics and information systems from UC Berkeley and is a founding member of the National Science Foundation's ACCURATE Center (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). He has served as an expert on independent teams invited by the States of California, Ohio and Maryland to analyze legal, privacy, security, usability and economic aspects of voting systems.
Andrew Selbst
Andrew Selbst is a Privacy Research Fellow at the Information Law Institute for 2011-2012. His interests lie at the intersection of media, technology, and civil liberties, including information privacy, telecom policy, media regulation, First Amendment, and the future of journalism. He graduated University of Michigan Law School, with honors, in May, where he was an Executive Editor of the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, and authored The Journalism Ratings Board: An Incentive Based Approach to Cable News Accountability, 44 U. Mich. J. L. Reform 467 (2011). Andrew also holds M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a S.B. in Electrical Engineering, and a S.B. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked for several years designing circuits before law school. In addition to his research, Andrew writes for the social justice blog Coffee House Talks and he can be found on Twitter @aselbst.
Student Fellows
Solon Barocas
Solon Barocas is a doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He was previously a Program Associate at the Russell Sage Foundation, where he helped administer major research initiatives on intercultural contact, social inequality, and the social and political consequences of the war on terror. Earlier, he served as Deputy Editor of Millennium - Journal of International Studies, housed at the London School of Economics, where he also obtained his MSc in International Relations. His master's thesis, De/re/coding Security in 'Societies of Control:' Data-mining as Political Practice, was recently published in a special issue of the St Antony's International Review on "The Internet: Power and Governance in a Digitised World," which he also presented at a related conference co-hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute. Barocas graduated from Brown University with a BA in Art-Semiotics and International Relations. At the University's Watson Institute for International Studies, he worked for over two years on the Information, Technology, War, and Peace Project.
Luke Stark
Luke Stark is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A native of Toronto, Canada, Luke holds an Honours BA in History and English and an MA in History, both from the University of Toronto; he has been generously funded by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Government of Ontario. Luke's research focuses on the history and philosophy of digital media technology and its role in regulating the everyday affective and emotional lives of individual users and broader publics; he is concurrently working on projects related to the changing dynamics of privacy and security in digital network environments, and is a member of the ILI's Privacy Research Group and a Principal with PRGLabs. Luke is also a Research Assistant for the National Science Foundation's Values in Design in the Future Internet Architecture project, headed by Helen Nissenbaum. Luke's academic pursuits have been complimented by work in Issues Management and Strategic Communications Planning for the Ontario Ministries of Health and Long-Term Care and Natural Resources; other highlights from an eclectic resume include forest ranger, sleep-away camp counsellor, and ranch hand.
Privacy Research Group Affiliates
Catherine Dwyer
Cathy Dwyer is Associate Professor of Information Technology at Pace University. Her research interests include online advertising, online privacy management, and social media. You can find out more about her here.
Travis Hall
Travis Hall is a Ph.D. candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. His research interests include biometrics, critical theory, bureaucracy, moral norms and the media, Science and Technology Studies, truth production, and bodies.
Jeramie D. Scott
Jeramie Scott is a third-year law student at NYU.
Past Fellows and Affiliates
Gaia Bernstein: 2002-2003
Amanda Conley: 2009-2010
Niva Elkin-Koren: 2004-2005
Jaime Madell: 2010-2011
Alice E. Marwick
Laura Moy: 2010-2011
Gregory Pomerantz: 2001-2002
Elizabeth Stark: 2008-2009
Alan Toner: 2001-2002
Philip Weiser: Fall 2008
Dr. Tal Zarsky: 2010-2011
Michael Zimmer: 2004-2007
Jonathan Zittrain: Spring 2008
Administrator
Nicole Arzt
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
Room 336
New York, NY 10012-1066
Phone: 212-998-6013
Fax: 212-995-4760
Email: nicole.arzt@nyu.edu