James Grimmelmann

I’m a professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech, where I direct CTRL-ALT, the Cornell Tech Research Lab in Applied Law and Technology.

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 search engines, digital copyright, online governance, content moderation, and other topics in computer and Internet law.

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

外圆内方

I tweet @jtlg@mastodon.lawprofs.org and blog at The Laboratorium.

Publications by date | topic | type

Current Teaching

Intellectual Property (Fall 2025)
Content Moderation and Platform Regulation (Fall 2025)
Digital Property (Spring 2026)

Recent Writings

James Grimmelmann, Benjamin L.W. Sobel, and David Stein, Generative Misinterpretation, Harvard Journal on Legislation (forthcoming)
The TikTok Ban and Its Consequences, Communications of the ACM, May 2025, at 18
Listeners’ Choices Online, Southern California Law Review (forthcoming)
The Fine Line Between Persuasion and Coercion, Communications of the ACM, January 2025, at 27
A. Feder Cooper, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Miranda Bogen, Matthew Jagielski, Katja Filippova, Ken Ziyu Liu, Alexandra Chouldechova, Jamie Hayes, Yangsibo Huang, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Ilia Shumailov, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Kairouz, Nicole Mitchell, Percy Liang, Daniel E. Ho, Yejin Choi, Sanmi Koyejo, Fernando Delgado, James Grimmelmann, Vitaly Shmatikov, Christopher De Sa, Solon Barocas, Amy Cyphert, Mark Lemley, danah boyd, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Miles Brundage, David Bau, Seth Neel, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Andreas Terzis, Hanna Wallach, Nicolas Papernot, and Katherine Lee, Machine Unlearning Doesn’t Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy, Research, and Practice (2024)
Yan Ji and James Grimmelmann, Regulatory Implications of MEV Mitigations, 5th Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance, in Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2024 International Workshops 335 (2024)
Tong Chen, Akari Asai, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Sewon Min, James Grimmelmann, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Pang Wei Koh, CopyBench: Measuring Literal and Non-Literal Reproduction of Copyright-Protected Text in Language Model Generation, Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 15134 (2024)
Kenny Peng and James Grimmelmann, Rescuing Counterspeech: A Bridging-Based Approach to Combating Misinformation (draft 2024)

Resources

I have written three inexpensive casebooks: Internet Law: Cases and Problems, Patterns of Information Law (IP), and Open Source Property (with four colleagues).

I maintain some lists of IP/tech resources for scholars and students:

Contact

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

Here is my disclosure statement.