Brett Frischmann is The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics at Villanova, an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, an affiliated faculty member of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino. Frischmann also served as the Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information and Technology Policy at Princeton University’s Center for Information and Technology Policy. Frischmann is an expert on intellectual property, privacy, cyber/Internet, and other areas of technology law as well as the intersection of these areas of law with other disciplines, including economics, computer science, political science, science and technology studies, and engineering. His research spans these disciplines, often involving collaborations with experts outside of law and often leading to publications in disciplinary (non-legal) peer review journals. His ongoing interdisciplinary research on the relationships between infrastructural resources, governance, commons, and spillovers includes a series of foundational books such as Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford 2012) and Governing Knowledge Commons (Oxford 2014). He is one of the lead PIs for the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons and a series editor for the Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons. His 2018 book, Re-Engineering Humanity, co-authored with philosopher Evan Selinger, thoroughly examines various mechanisms for techno-social engineering of humans, as well as the normative conflict between a commitment to pluralism and engineered optimality. Recent interdisciplinary work explores and advocates for different forms of friction-in-design as a means for counteracting dominant efficiency logics and safeguarding human capabilities and values. Representative examples include better digital contracts, demonstrably informed consent, and age gating.
