Josh Fairfield William Donald Bain Family Professor of Law and Director of Artificial Intelligence Legal Innovation Strategy

Phone: 540-458-8529

Email: fairfieldj@wlu.edu

Office: 456 Lewis Hall 

Web and Social: joshuafairfield.com  •  twitter.com/joshfairfield  •  linkedin.com/in/joshfairfield  •  Clubhouse: joshfairfield

SSRN  •  CV  •  Publications & Research  •  High Res Photo

Area of Expertise

Internet of Things, Bitcoin, Data Privacy, Video Game Regulation, Virtual Worlds

Education

BA, Swarthmore

JD, University of Chicago

About

Josh Fairfield is an internationally recognized legal scholar and technology law expert serving as the Bain Professor of Law and AI Institute Director at Washington and Lee University School of Law. His work focuses on artificial intelligence, cognitive security, digital property, privacy, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and emerging technology law, and he frequently serves as an expert witness in related litigation and arbitration.

He is the author of two books on law and technology, including "Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?" (Cambridge) and "Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom" (Cambridge). His third book, on how AI slop targets human communities, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He publishes research and commentary in leading legal academic journals and outlets such as the New York Times, Forbes, and Financial Times.

Before academia, Professor Fairfield worked as a technology entrepreneur and served as Director of Research and Development at Rosetta Stone. He has advised U.S. government agencies on privacy, national security, and online safety, held a Fulbright at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, and was elected to the American Law Institute in 2013. He regularly lectures and collaborates internationally on the intersection of law, technology, and global policy.

Recent Publications

Books

Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?, Cambridge University Press (2021)

Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom, Cambridge University Press (2017)

Articles

Clean Data: Recursion as Pollution in Environmental AI, Oxford Intersections: AI in Society (2025)

Give It Back: Title in Digital Property, in The Cambridge Handbook of Emerging Issues at the Intersection of Commercial Law and Technology (Stacy-Ann Elvy & Nancy S. Kim eds., 2025)

Crypto-Counterfeiting, William & Mary Business Law Review (2024)

Digital Property Cycles, Washington and Lee Law Review (2023)

Making Virtual Things, William & Mary Law Review (2023)

Governing the Interface Between Natural and Formal Language in Smart Contracts (with Niloufer Selvadurai), UCLA Journal of Law & Technology (2022)

Property as the Law of Virtual Things, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (2022)

Tokenized: The Law of Non-Fungible Tokens and Unique Digital Propert, Indiana Law Journal (2022)

"You Keep Using That Word": Why Privacy Doesn't Mean What Lawyers Think (Joshua A.T. Fairfield) Osgoode Hall Law Journal (2022)

The Human Element: The Under-theorized and Underutilized Component Necessary for Fostering Blockchain Development, Cleveland State Law Review (2019)

The Language-Game of Privacy, Michigan Law Review (2017)

Privacy as a Public Good (with Christoph Engel), Duke Law Journal (2015)

Bitproperty, Southern California Law Review (2015)

Digital Innocence (Joshua A.T. Fairfield and Erik Luna) Cornell Law Review (2014)

Do-Not-Track as Default, Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property (2013)

- See Prof. Fairfield's full list of publications at his Publications & Research page.