I am an assistant professor at Boston College Law School. I teach and write on privacy law, evidence, and technology from a sociolegal perspective.
My research examines how legal actors and institutions adjust to changes in their informational environments and the impact of those changes on enforcement systems. Drawing on qualitative research methods, I theorize the organizational processes that shape legal actors' state access to and use of information to enforce law. I am also part of an interdisciplinary research team studying federal courts’ disposition of disability discrimination cases. In that project, I focus on comparing how judges evaluate evidence produced by organizations versus individuals.
I have Ph.D. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and an A.B. from Harvard College. I have also served as an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission and clerked for Judge Deborah L. Cook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Judge Nancy F. Atlas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Frontline Enforcement in the Age of Information, 50 Law & Soc. Inquiry 312 (2025)
Disputed and Disfavored: Pain, Mental Illness, and Invisible Conditions in Disability Discrimination Cases, 371 Soc. Sci. & Med. 117885 (2025) (with Rachel Best, Catherine Fisk, Linda Hamilton Krieger, and Diana Reddy)
Internet Technology Companies as Evidence Intermediaries, 110 Va. L. Rev. 1227 (2024)
Recipient of the Reidenberg-Kerr Award for Outstanding Scholarship by a Junior Scholar at the 2022 Privacy Law Scholars Conference.
Creative Confluence: Lauren Edelman’s Collaborations, 57 Law & Soc’y Rev. 397 (2023) (with Rachel Best, Catherine Fisk, Linda Krieger, Diana Reddy, and Todd Neece)
Conversations in Law and Society: Oral Histories of the Emergence and Transformation of the Movement, 16 Annu. Rev. L. Soc. Sci. 97 (2020) (with Calvin Morrill, Lauren Edelman, and Rosann Greenspan)
FTC Privacy and Data Security Enforcement and Guidance Under Section, 5, 25:2 Competition 89 (2016) (with Alexander Reicher)
The Death of the Privacy Policy? Effective Disclosures after In re Sears, Note, 25 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 671 (2010)
Email: yan.fang@bc.edu