Advancing AI Scholarship & Research • News & Events • Penn Carey Law

The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI) is grounded in faculty scholarship that spans regulation, technology, economics, and governance, creating an interdisciplinary foundation that not only informs how AI is taught, studied, and integrated across the curriculum, but also shapes broader legal and policy conversations through influential research and published work.

Take a closer look at the ways the cutting-edge research and scholarship from Penn Carey Law faculty intersects with AI and emerging legal tech topics.

David S. Abrams

William B. and Mary Barb Johnson Professorship of Law and Economics; Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy

David Abrams is one of the leading economists working at the intersection of empirical law and economics. His work strives to understand and measure how individuals respond to incentives in various legal contexts.

Abrams’ latest article examines whether large language models can accurately analyze the legality of police stops, particularly under Fourth Amendment standards such as reasonable suspicion.

“Prose and Cons” extends Abrams’ focus on empirical analysis of criminal justice decision-making, using data from over a decade of attorney-coded police stops to offer a scalable tool to monitor and study police conduct while raising questions about accuracy, accountability, and bias in the criminal justice system.

“Digital data in law-related domains has become abundant in recent years; my work is increasingly focused on how AI can help us more quickly and accurately evaluate that data,” he said.

Tom Baker

Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law

Tom Baker is a highly regarded insurance expert and a leading scholar of insurance law and policy. His work explores insurance law, institutions, and markets using methods from history, economics, psychology, and sociology, advancing our understanding of insurance as governance by examining the historical development of insurance ideas and institutions and their impact on civil litigation, health care, crime, and corporate governance.

Baker’s AI-related work aligns within his broader interest in how legal institutions regulate emerging forms of financial risk and technological change. Specifically, his “Robo-Advisor” scholarship applies traditional frameworks of consumer protection, fiduciary duty, and financial oversight to AI-driven financial services—particularly automated financial product advisors (“robo-advisors”)—while critically examining the evolving regulatory landscape and challenges posed by generative AI systems.

“AI and Law Tech present enormous opportunities for lawyers who take the lead in building new tools and learning how to use them,” he said.

Jack Boeglin

Sharswood Fellow

Jack Boeglin studies the federal courts and the interdependence of law and technology. His most recent work examines how to leverage legal norms and methodologies to help solve the “alignment problem” in AI governance.

Boeglin has previously published articles covering a range of topics including the jurisprudential oddity of “confining cases to their facts,” the practice of result-based differential punishment in the criminal legal system, the regulation of self-driving cars, and the use of stare decisis to create a body of secret law in the courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Prior to joining Penn Carey Law, he worked as an appellate litigator and tech regulation practitioner at an international law firm in London and Washington, D.C.

“My scholarship charts the intersection of legal decision-making and Artificial Intelligence,” said Boeglin. “This research focuses on two key questions: First, how can we improve AI systems by teaching them to apply legal concepts and interpretive methods to their own conduct? And second, how can we leverage AI’s burgeoning capabilities to improve the legal process itself?”

Cary Coglianese

Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science; Director, Penn Program on Regulation 

Cary Coglianese specializes in the study of administrative law and regulatory processes, with an emphasis on the empirical evaluation of alternative processes and strategies and the role of public participation, technology, and business-government relations in policymaking.

His scholarship on regulatory governance and algorithmic decision-making has made him a leading voice on how law should respond to AI. In 2024, he was appointed to the Advisory Committee on AI by the Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission in 2024, which delivered a report of its recommendations to the state legislature in 2026.

Affiliated with Penn’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, Wharton’s AI & Analytics Initiative, the Penn Center on Media, Technology and Democracy, and the Wharton Human-AI Research program, he is also a member of the quality control committee for LUMSA University’s Jean Monnet Center on Sustainable Artificial Intelligence for Regulation and the advisory committee for ASTM’s Center of Excellence on Advancing Standardization for Critical and Emerging Technologies. He is a nonresident fellow of the Information Society Law Center at the University of Milan.

In 2020, he authored a framework report on public sector AI use that informed the development of guidance issued by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) on federal agencies’ deployment of AI. Nearly a decade earlier, he authored a report to ACUS on “Federal Agency Use of Electronic Media in the Rulemaking Process,” which then informed ACUS’s development of another set of government-wide recommendations.

Coglianese founded the Penn Program on Regulation (PPR) in 2006, which he continues to direct and which draws together students and faculty from the Law School and across the University who work on a variety of cross-cutting issues related to regulation, including AI governance. Through PPR, he has led an early series of dialogues on public sector AI use as well as a yearlong lecture series on AI and climate change.

His extensive AI-related scholarship spans over two decades, examining how governments should regulate AI systems and how AI will need to transform the work of regulatory institutions themselves.

“AI governance is not something that can be established effectively through just a technological fix, or a single set of rules, or the passage of a single statute,” said Coglianese. “It has to be an ongoing enterprise, and it has to be an enterprise in which people are working vigilantly at their utmost of ability. I have long said that regulatory excellence is ‘people excellence,’ and nowhere is that as true as it is in the domain of AI governance.”

David Hoffman

William A. Schnader Professor of Law

David Hoffman is a widely cited scholar who focuses his research and teaching on contract law. His work is typically interdisciplinary—built through collaboration with co-authors from a variety of fields—and spans all aspects of contracting theory and practice, as well as civil procedure and judicial decision-making, and is informed by empirical evidence.

Hoffman’s AI-related scholarship extends his interest in how legal texts are interpreted by courts and consumers, examining how large language models estimate contractual meaning, their limitations, and the implications for judicial practice and contract theory.

In addition to his scholarly work, his Substack, Contracts’ Empire, explores “how technological change has supercharged contracts’ role in our lives, and what if anything to do about it,” while frequently covering areas of artificial intelligence and legal education.

Gideon Parchomovsky

Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law

Gideon Parchomovsky is a prominent scholar specializing in intellectual property, property law, and cyber law. His significant contributions to the field include wide-ranging scholarship on property and liability rules, insider trading, trademarks, domain names, and innovation policy.

In “Artificial Inventorship,” Parchomovsky examines whether AI systems can qualify as inventors under patent law, and how legal systems should treat AI-generated innovation. The article also analyzes how the idea of AI-generated invention challenges fundamental assumptions about human-centered creativity and patent doctrine, the ways the concept of “inventor” may need reconsidering altogether, and proposes a legal reform that would calibrate protection to the level of AI inventorship.

Jennifer E. Rothman

Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law

Jennifer E. Rothman is globally recognized for her scholarship in the field of intellectual property, privacy, and entertainment & media law, and is the leading expert on right of publicity and personality rights. Her scholarship focuses on conflicts between intellectual property rights and other constitutionally protected rights, particularly the freedom of speech.

Rothman’s AI-related work explores how generative AI can replicate or simulate human identity, voice, and likeness, raising complex legal issues involving copyright, trademark, publicity rights, and privacy law. As generative AI intensifies debates about ownership and control over digital representations of individuals, her recent scholarship considers how best to confront this moment and design and interpret intellectual property and other laws that are being used to turn people into a form of property.

Rothman has testified in Congress multiple times, including before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, to address issues related to the proposed “No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas and Unauthorized Duplications Act of 2024” (No AI FRAUD Act) and the NO FAKES Act.

Additionally, Rothman is the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission Study of the Protection of Name, Image, and Likeness Rights, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an advisor on the Restatement of the Law (Third) of Torts: Defamation and Privacy.

Her website, Rothman’s Roadmap to the Right of Publicity, provides expert analysis of right of publicity and related laws, as well as commentary on recent cases and legislation, including AI-related topics. 

“In our rush to fix the problem of deepfakes, we should make sure that the law does not worsen the problem by giving legitimacy to deceptively-authorized deepfakes. Nor should the law overlook the harms that flow from even authorized deepfakes that deceive the public,” said Rothman.

“Unfortunately, too much of the recently proposed and enacted legislation does exactly this,” she continued. “Given that we already have many laws at both the state and federal level that apply to deepfakes, further legislation in this area should be squarely focused on addressing the current gaps in the law, with an eye toward limiting deceptive uses and ensuring that the people depicted truly agreed to the deepfake portrayal.”

Polk Wagner

Michael A. Fitts Professor of Law; Deputy Dean; Co-Director, Center for Innovation, Technology & Competition

Polk Wagner focuses his research and teaching in intellectual property law and policy, with a special interest in patent law.

He serves on the Penn AI Council Faculty Advisory Committee and leads the Law School’s AI Lab, a joint faculty and student initiative launched in 2023 that explores how AI tools can assist legal practice, judicial decision-making, and legal education, including the development and testing of AI-based legal research and analysis tools for both faculty and 17 judicial chambers.

Additionally, Wagner serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Innovation, Technology & Competition (CTIC), which further advances conversations and initiatives around law, technology, and economic analysis while leveraging collaboration across the broader Penn community to address the complex legal questions raised by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.

“Legal institutions are where the most consequential decisions about AI will be made — in courtrooms, regulatory agencies, and legislatures,” said Wagner. “Penn Carey Law is positioning itself to lead that conversation, not just by teaching students about AI, but by doing the hard interdisciplinary work of figuring out how existing legal frameworks apply to a technology that’s evolving faster than any we’ve seen.”

Christopher Yoo

Imasogie Professor in Law and Technology; Professor of Communication; Professor of Computer and Information Science; Founding Director, Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition; Co-Director, Penn Center on Media, Technology & Democracy

Christopher Yoo has emerged as one of the world’s leading authorities on law and technology. One of the most cited scholars in administrative and regulatory law as well as intellectual property, he has authored five books and more than 100 scholarly works.

Yoo’s AI-related work includes a multiyear international project to create implementable AI standards. He also serves as an advisor to the American Law Institute’s project on Principles of the Law for Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence.

Additionally, Yoo serves as the founding director of the Center for Innovation, Technology & Competition (CTIC), which further advances conversations and initiatives around law, technology, and economic analysis while leveraging collaboration across the broader Penn community to address the complex legal questions raised by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.

His AI-related scholarship explores institutional frameworks for AI governance, including regulatory models, competition effects, transparency requirements, and the role of technical standards bodies, aligning with his adjacent work in technology governance and the institutional design of digital policy.

“The emergence of AI has raised complex and important questions about how it should be governed,” said Yoo. “A major part of my work is exploring the standards as a governance modality, paying particular attention to how they should be adapted to cover such a new and dynamic technology.”

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