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 tweet @grimmelm and blog at The Laboratorium.

Teaching

Intellectual Property (Fall 2022)
Internet Law (Spring 2023)

Current Research

EIP-5218: NFT Rights Management (draft 2022) (with Yan Ji and Tyler Kell) and IC3 NFT License (draft 2022)
The Humble Vending Machine, Jotwell: Technology Law (July 2022), reviewing Gregory Klass, How to Interpret a Vending Machine: Smart Contracts and Contract Law (draft 2022)
Internet Law: Cases and Problems (Semaphore Press) (12th ed. 2022)
Blockchains as Infrastructure and Semicommons, 64 William and Mary Law Review (forthcoming 2023) (with A. Jason Windawi)
Programming Languages and Law: A Research Agenda, 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law (Nov. 1-2, 2022) (forthcoming)
Shrutarshi Basu, Nate Foster, James Grimmelmann, Shan Parikh, and Ryan Richardson, A Programming Language for Future Interests, 24 Yale Journal of Law and Technology 75 (2022) and Littleton: A Future Interests Interpreter
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. Sign up for updates.
My other writings are collected on my Publications page.

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