Ben Sobel is a lawyer and a scholar of information law. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City, where he is also affiliated with the Cornell Tech Research Lab in Applied Law + Technology. Ben’s work examines the way digital media, artificial intelligence, and networked devices influence the law of tangible and intellectual property, privacy, competition, and expression—as well as the distribution of wealth and power more generally. The question motivating his current research in copyright and privacy law is, “When does the law treat information about something as constituting the thing itself?”
Ben previously served as a law clerk to Chief Judge David Barron and Judge Michael Boudin of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and to Judge Pierre Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has also served as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
Ben’s scholarship has been cited in briefs submitted to the Supreme Court of the United States, and it has been published by the Lewis & Clark Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, and Oxford University Press. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
For fun, Ben plays music and bakes bread.