NEW YORK–The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University announced today that Olivier Sylvain, a Professor of Law at Fordham University and a former senior advisor to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has been appointed to a two-year term at the Institute as a Senior Policy Research Fellow. He will help lead projects on topics including privacy and digital public infrastructure. He also will help oversee the Institute’s partnership with Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which aims to train new policy professionals and generate innovative public policy ideas at the intersection of free speech and new technology.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Professor Olivier Sylvain to the Institute,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “Professor Sylvain has written incisively and influentially on issues relating to privacy, equality, and public discourse online, and I know we will benefit tremendously from our collaboration with him.”
Sylvain’s recent writing and scholarship have focused on liability under the Communications Decency Act, the social impacts of artificial intelligence, and community-owned networked computing, among other things. His current projects include an essay on consumer consent that, in the wake of two high-profile binding decisions by the European Data Protection Board, raises substantial doubts about its efficacy in the context of prevalent online commercial surveillance practices. He is also working on a book that builds on his recent writing on artificial intelligence, commercial surveillance, intermediary liability, and “network equality.”
At the Knight Institute, he will lead both closed and public-facing projects relating to privacy and digital public infrastructure, with the goal of proposing new policy proposals that would strengthen the digital public sphere. With the Institute’s new policy director, Nadine Farid Johnson, he will also help oversee the Institute’s Policy Lab, the centerpiece of the Institute’s new partnership with SIPA. The Lab will include a seminar course on law and policy relating to the digital public sphere and a practicum that allows SIPA students to work with faculty and Knight Institute staff on public policy projects, including empirical studies, policy analysis, and legislative drafting. Individual practicum projects will be guided by interdisciplinary teams, including SIPA faculty and Knight Institute litigators and researchers.
“We’re excited to partner with Professor Sylvain, and faculty and students at SIPA to address critical emerging issues centered on free speech and public discourse online,” said Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight Institute. “His work with the Institute over the next few years will be pivotal to our work advancing understanding among policymakers about how technology shapes the flow of information and ideas online, with the aim of promoting an online speech environment that strengthens democracy.”
“The Knight Institute has done groundbreaking work to preserve freedoms and hold powerful people and companies accountable in the networked information economy,” said Sylvain. “They have also been important to promoting research and scholarship in these areas, including my own. I am thrilled that the Institute has asked me to join them to build a policy-facing aspect to this work. The prospect of working with SIPA, moreover, will add a distinctive and useful dimension to these efforts. I hope that my contributions live up to the high expectations they have set.”
The Institute’s current visiting scholars are RonNell Andersen Jones, Lee E. Teitelbaum Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law; Sonja R. West, Otis Brumby Professor in First Amendment Law at the University of Georgia School of Law; and Sam Lebovic, an associate professor of history at George Mason University.
Previous visiting scholars include Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University; J. Nathan Matias, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University; Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago; Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure; Amy Kapczynski, professor of law at Yale Law School and faculty co-director of the Law and Political Economy Project; Jamal Greene, Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School; and David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. More information about their projects is available here.
Learn more about the Knight Institute’s Visiting Research Scholars program here.
For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected]