James Grimmelmann

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

I try to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research areas include generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property.

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 post as @jtlg on Bluesky and I blog at The Laboratorium.

外圆内方

Please read this before asking me to do something: “Thank You for Asking, but No.”

Teaching

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

Scholarship

James Grimmelmann, Benjamin L.W. Sobel, and David Stein, Generative Misinterpretation, 63 Harvard Journal on Legislation 229 (2026)
AI Scraping and the Open Web, Communications of the ACM, January 2026, at 20
The Edge of Tomorrow, Jotwell: Technology Law (November 2025)
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)
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

Some interesting quotations
Some thematic playlists
Some informative books
Some intricate fiction
Some singular works of art
My origin story

Contact

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