James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. He helps lawyers and technologists understand each other, applying ideas from computer science to problems in law and vice versa. He is the author of the casebook Internet Law: Cases and Problems and of over fifty scholarly articles and essays on digital copyright, content moderation, search engine regulation, online governance, privacy on social networks,, and other topics in computer and Internet law.

He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College. Before law school, he worked a programmer for Microsoft; after graduation, he clerked for a federal appellate judge. He is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project. He previously taught at New York Law School, Georgetown, and the University of Maryland.

He has written for Slate, Salon, Wired, Ars Technica, and Publishers Weekly; he is a regular source of expert commentary for major news media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and All Things Considered. He and his students created the Public Index website to inform the public about the Google Books settlement.

Education

• A.B. Harvard College, 1999
• J.D., Yale Law School, 2005

Publications

• “Spyware vs. Spyware: Software Conflicts and User Autonomy,” Ohio State Technology Law Journal 16, p. 25 (2020)
• Design Choices for Central Bank Digital Currency: Policy and Technical Considerations, with Sarah Allen, Srdjan Capkun, Ittay Eyal, Giulia Fanti, Bryan Ford, Ari Juels, Kari Kostiainen, Sarah Meiklejohn, Andrew Miller, Eswar Prasad, Karl Wüst, and Fan Zhang (Brookings Institution, 2020)
• “Listeners’ Choices,” University of Colorado Law Review 90, p. 365 (2019)