Margot Kaminski

Professor of Law

401 UCB
2450 Kittredge Loop Drive
Wolf Law Building
Boulder, CO  80309
Office: 417
Phone: (303) 735-5218
E-mail: margot.kaminski@colorado.edu

Curriculum Vitae:  View (PDF format)

Bio:
Margot Kaminski is a Professor at the University of Colorado Law School and the Director of the Privacy Initiative at Silicon Flatirons. She specializes in the law of new technologies, focusing on information governance, privacy, and freedom of expression. Recently, her work has focused on AI Law; she is currently drafting a leading co-authored casebook in the field.

In 2018, Professor Kaminski conducted research on comparative data privacy law as a recipient of the Fulbright-Schuman Innovation Grant. In 2024, she conducted research on comparative AI Law at the European University Institute (EUI) as a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow and recipient of a 2024 Fulbright-Schuman Grant. She is a 2024-25 Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Professor Kaminski's academic work has been published or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Boston University Law Review, among others. Her work has received the 2022 Jules Milstein Scholarship Award for excellence in legal scholarship; the Future of Privacy Forum's 2020 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award; the 2019 University of Colorado Provost's Faculty Achievement Award for Pre-Tenure Faculty; and the 2016 Junior Scholar Award at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (2016).

Prior to joining Colorado Law, Professor Kaminski was an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law (2014-2017) and served for three years as the Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She is a co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) Clinic at Yale Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Forthcoming

Regulating the Risks of AI, 103 B.U. L. REV. _ (forthcoming 2023) (85 pages).

Articles

Kaminski (with Rebecca Crootof and W. Nicholson Price II), Humans in the Loop, 76:2 VAND. L. REV. 429 (2023) (80 pages).
Technological "Disruption" of the Law's Imagined Scene: Some Lessons from Lex Informatica, 36 BERKELEY TECH. L.J. 101-131 (2022).
Kaminski (with Jennifer M. Urban), The Right to Contest AI, 121 COLUM. L. REV. 1957-2048 (2021).
Catalyzing Privacy Law, (with Anupam Chander and William McGeveran), 105 Minn. L. Rev. 1733 (2021).
Algorithmic impact assessments under the GDPR: producing multi-layered explanations, (with Gianclaudio Malgieri), 11:2 Int'l Data Priv. L. 125 (2021).
An American's Guide to the GDPR, (with Meg Leta Jones), 98 Denv. L. Rev. no. 1 (2020).
Binary Governance, 92 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1529 (2019).
The Right to Explanation, Explained, 34 BERKELEY TECH. L. J. (2019).
Privacy and the Right to Record, 97 B.U. L. REV. 167 (2017).
Kaminski (with Toni Massaro and Helen Norton), Siri-ously 2.0: What Free Speech Rights for Artificial Intelligence Reveal about the First Amendment, 101 MINN. L. REV. 2481 (2017).
Kaminski (with Guy Rub), Copyright's Framing Problem, 64 UCLA L. REV. 1102 (2017).
Authorship, Disrupted: AI Authors in Copyright and First Amendment Law, 51 UC DAVIS L. REV. 589 (2017).
Regulating Real-World Surveillance, 90 WASH. L. REV. 1113 (2015).
Kaminski (with Shane Witnov), The Conforming Effect: First Amendment Implications of Surveillance, Beyond Chilling Speech, 49 U. RICH. L. REV. 465 (2015).
The Capture of International Intellectual Property Law through the U.S. Trade Regime, 87 S. CAL. L. REV. 977 (2014).
Copyright Crime and Punishment: The First Amendment's Proportionality Puzzle, 73 MD. L. REV. 587 (2014).
Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones and the Things They Carry, 4 CALIF. L. REV. CIR. 57 (2013).
Real Masks and Real Name Policies: Applying Anti-Mask Case Law to Anonymous Online Speech, 23 FORDHAM INTELL. PROP. MEDIA & ENT. L.J. 815 (2013).

Book Chapters

Siri-ously 2.0: What Artificial Intelligence Reveals About the First Amendment, (with Toni M. Massaro and Helen Norton), forthcoming 2022 in Robot II (ed., Ryan Calo, Michael Froomkin, and Kristen Thomason; Edward Elgar Press).
Understanding Transparency in Algorithmic Accountability, in THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF THE LAW OF ALGORITHMS (Woodrow Barfield ed., Cambridge University Press 2020).
Intellectual and Social Freedom, CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF SURVEILLANCE LAW, EDS. DAVID GRAY & STEPHEN E. HENDERSON (2018).

Symposia, Invited Essays, and Short Articles

Symposium: The California Consumer Privacy Act, (with Jacob Snow, Felix Wu & Justin Hughes (moderator)), 54 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 157 (2020).
Carpenter v. United States: Big Data is Different, Geo. Wash. L. Rev. On the Docket (Oct. Term 2017), July 2 2018.
Authorship, Disrupted: AI Authors in Copyright and First Amendment Law, 51 U.C. Davis Law Review 589 (2017).
Kaminski (with Cindy Grimm, Matthew Rueben, and William D. Smart), Averting Robot Eyes, 76 MD. L. REV. 983 (2017).
Standing after Snowden, 66 DEPAUL L. REV. 413 (2017).
When the Default is No Penalty: Negotiating Privacy at the NTIA, 94 DEN. L. REV. 923 (2016-17).
Robots in the Home: What Will We Have Agreed To?, 51 IDAHO L. REV. 661 (2015).

Policy Briefs

Worked with Technology Law and Policy Clinic to file comments on privacy to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration.
First Amendment Law Professors Brief in Fields v. Philadelphia in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, supporting a "right to record" law enforcement officials in public places, October 31, 2016.
First Amendment Legal Scholars Brief in Wikimedia v. NSA in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, First Amendment Legal Scholars Brief in Wikimedia v. NSA in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging "Upstream" NSA Internet Surveillance, February 24, 2016. Kaminski (with Amie Stepanovich, & Nabiha Syed), Filed comments on drones and privacy to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration.
Kaminski (with Amie Stepanovich, & Nabiha Syed), Filed comments on drones and privacy to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration, https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/kaminski_stepanovich_syed.pdf.

Popular Press

Free Speech Isn't a Pass for Privacy Violations, (with Scott Skinner-Thompson), Slate, Mar. 9 2020.
A Recent Renaissance in Privacy Law, COMM. ACM, Sept. 2020, at 24.
The Legislation That Targets the Racist Impacts of Tech, (with Andrew D. Selbst),The New York Times (May 5, 2019).
Shadow health records meet new data privacy laws, (with W. Nicholson Price II, Timo Minssen, Kayte Spector-Bagdady) SCIENCE, (Feb. 01, 2019)..
Brett Kavanaugh has Some Alarmingly Outdated Views about Privacy, SLATE, (July 12, 2018).
Facebook, Free Expression, and the Power of a Leak, (with Kate Klonick) THE NEW YORK TIMES, (June 27, 2017).
Enough with the Sunbathing Teenager Gambit, SLATE, (May 17, 2016).
What the Scarlett Johansson Robot Says about the Future, SLATE, (Apr. 7, 2016).
Don't Keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Secret, THE NEW YORK TIMES, (Apr. 14, 2015).
Toward defining privacy expectations in an age of oversharing, THE ECONOMIST, (Aug. 16, 2018).
Privacy is Not a Barrier to Trade, SLATE, (June 4, 2015).
Up in the Air: The free-speech problems raised by regulating drones, SLATE, (Nov. 25, 2014).
Up in the Air: States shouldn't wait until courts weigh in to place limits on drone surveillance, SLATE, (Sep. 5, 2014).
The Supreme Court's Cloud-Computing Confusion, THE NEW REPUBLIC, (June 26, 2014).
PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back, THE ATLANTIC, (June 7, 2013).

Courses:

Fall 2025 Artificial Intelligence and the Law LAWS 6631-801
Spring 2025 Property LAWS 5624-802
Fall 2024 Special Topics LAWS 6708-801
Spring 2023 Property LAWS 5624-802
Spring 2023 Information Privacy and Cybersecurity LAWS 6361-801
Fall 2022 Seminar: Advanced Information Privacy LAWS 8361-801
Spring 2022 Property LAWS 5624-802
Spring 2022 Seminar: Computers and the Law LAWS 8321-801
Fall 2021 Information Privacy and Cybersecurity LAWS 6361-801
Spring 2021 Property LAWS 5624-802
Spring 2021 Seminar: Advanced Information Privacy LAWS 8361-801
Spring 2020 Property LAWS 5624-803
Spring 2020 Seminar: Computers and the Law LAWS 8321-801
Fall 2019 Information Privacy and Cybersecurity LAWS 6361-801
Spring 2019 Property LAWS 5624-802
Fall 2018 Introduction to Intellectual Property Law LAWS 6301-801
Fall 2018 Introduction to Intellectual Property Law LAWS 6301-902
Fall 2018 Information Privacy and Cybersecurity LAWS 6361-801
Fall 2018 Information Privacy and Cybersecurity LAWS 6361-902



Our Vision

With our roots in Colorado and a global outlook, we are ...

a supportive and diverse educational and scholarly community in a place that inspires vigorous pursuit of ideas, critical analysis, contemplation, and civic engagement to advance knowledge about the law in an open, just society.

Our Mission

To be an outstanding public law school that: provides students with a state-of-the-art legal education and prepares them to serve wisely and with professionalism; advances the development of knowledge through scholarship, testing of new ideas, and challenges to the status quo; and serves as a vehicle and catalyst for meaningful public service, all of which deliver high value to our students and have positive impacts?both locally and globally?on the legal profession and society.