James Grimmelmann is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. His work tries to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. His goal is to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. He is the author of the casebook Internet Law: Cases and Problems and of over seventy scholarly articles and essays on generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, digital property, and other topics.
He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College. Before law school, he worked a programmer for Microsoft; after graduation, he clerked for a federal appellate judge. He is a board member at Creative Commons and an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project. He previously taught at New York Law School, Georgetown, and the University of Maryland.
He has written for Slate, The Verge, Wired, Ars Technica, and Publishers Weekly; he is a regular source of expert commentary for major news media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and All Things Considered. He and his students created the Public Index website to inform the public about the Google Books settlement.
He has been blogging since 2000 at the Laboratorium (laboratorium.net) and tweets as @jtlg.bsky.social. His home page is at james.grimmelmann.net.