Olivier Sylvain

Research and Teaching Areas

• Information Law;
• Communications Law;
• Legislation;
• Administrative Law

Olivier is a Professor of Law at Fordham University. His research is in communications law and policy. His most recent writing, scholarship, and public speaking engagements are on liability under the Communications Decency Act, the social impacts of artificial intelligence and community-owned networked computing. In 2020, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded him a grant to support this work.

Olivier teaches Legislation & Regulation, Administrative Law, Information Law, U.S. Data Protection Law & Privacy, and information law related courses. At Fordham, he has been the Director of the McGannon Center for Communications Research, the Academic Director of the Center for Law and Information Policy, and a research affiliate at the Center on Race, Law, and Justice. Before entering academia, Olivier was a Karpatkin Fellow in the National Legal Office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City and a litigation associate at Jenner & Block, LLC, in Washington, D.C. Until September 2021, he was the Board President of the ACLU's New York affiliate and sat on the Academic Advisory Board for the Open Markets Institute and the Advisory Committee for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. He currently holds a short-term appointment as a Senior Advisor to the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Education

• Williams College, BA
• Georgetown University Law Center, JD
• Columbia University, PhD