Frank Pasquale

Frank Pasquale is a noted expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. He is an internationally regarded scholar, whose work has addressed the regulation of technology in health care, technology, and finance firms.

His book The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press 2015) has been recognized internationally as a landmark study on information asymmetries. The Black Box Society develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance, while promoting pragmatic reforms to improve the information economy. The journal Big Data & Society recently hosted an interdisciplinary symposium on Black Box Society.

Pasquale’s latest book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Harvard University Press 2020) develops a new political economy of automation, in which human capacities are the irreplaceable center of an inclusive economy. He has also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford University Press 2020).

Pasquale has advised government leaders in the health care, internet, and finance industries, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary and Energy & Commerce Committees, the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He also has advised officials in Canada and the United Kingdom on law and technology policy. He served on the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society from 2014-16.

Pasquale’s work on “algorithmic accountability” has helped bring the insights and demands of social justice movements to AI law and policy. In media and communication studies, he has developed a comprehensive legal analysis of barriers to, and opportunities for, regulation of internet platforms. In privacy law and surveillance, his work is among the leading legal research on regulation of algorithmic ranking, scoring, and sorting systems, including credit scoring and threat scoring.

Pasquale is an Affiliate Fellow at Yale University’s Information Society Project, and a member of the American Law Institute. He is co-editor-in-chief of the new Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law (CRCL), based in the Netherlands, and a member of a Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S).