James Grimmelmann

I’m a professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. 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.

I’m allegedly working on a book, CPU, Esq.: How Lawyers and Coders Do Things with Words, which explores the linguistic parallels between software and legal texts.

I tweet as @jtlg.bsky.social and blog at The Laboratorium.

外圆内方

Teaching

Intellectual Property (Fall 2025)
Content Moderation and Platform Regulation (Fall 2025)
Digital Property (Spring 2026)
All courses 2007–

Scholarship

A. Feder Cooper, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Miranda Bogen, Kevin Klyman, Matthew Jagielski, Katja Filippova, Ken Ziyu Liu, Alexandra Chouldechova, Jamie Hayes, Yangsibo Huang, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Kairouz, Nicole Mitchell, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Abigail Z. Jacobs, James Grimmelmann, Vitaly Shmatikov, Christopher De Sa, Ilia Shumailov, Andreas Terzis, Solon Barocas, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Danah Boyd, Yejin Choi, Sanmi Koyejo, Fernando Delgado, Percy Liang, Daniel E. Ho, Pamela Samuelson, Miles Brundage, David Bau, Seth Neel, Hanna Wallach, Amy B. Cyphert, Mark Lemley, Nicolas Papernot, and Katherine Lee, Machine Unlearning Doesn’t Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy, Research, and Practice, NeurIPS 2025
Listeners’ Choices Online, 92 Southern California Law Review 1231 (2025)
Deconstructing the Take It Down Act, Communications of the ACM, September 2025, at 28
A. Feder Cooper and James Grimmelmann, The Files are in the Computer: On Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AI, 100 Chicago-Kent Law Review 141 (2025)
Katherine Lee, A. Feder Cooper, and James Grimmelmann, Talkin’ ’Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain, 72 Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 251 (2025)
Information Property (2025)
Internet Law: Cases and Problems (Semaphore Press 15th ed. 2025)
James Grimmelmann, Benjamin L.W. Sobel, and David Stein, Generative Misinterpretation, Harvard Journal on Legislation (forthcoming)
All publications by date | topic | type

Books

I have written four inexpensive casebooks:

Internet Law: Cases and Problems (Internet law casebook)
Information Property (IP textbook)
Patterns of Information Law (IP casebook)
Open Source Property (Property casebook, with four colleagues)

Resources

I maintain some lists of resources, mainly but not only for IP/tech students and scholars. I find them useful. Maybe you will find them useful too.

Miscellaneous

I keep a collection of interesting quotations.

Contact

Cornell Tech
2 West Loop Road
New York, NY 10044
james.grimmelmann@cornell.edu
he/him/his