YAN FANG
I research and write about law, technology, and society. My scholarship focuses on how legal actors and institutions adjust to changes in their informational environments and the impact of those changes on the aims and operations of adjudicative systems.
Using qualitative methods, I theorize the legal and organizational processes that shape legal professionals’ access to and use of evidence across several bodies of law, including privacy law, evidence, civil procedure, and disabilities law. I also draw on insights from my qualitative work to identify organizational interventions that will further values fundamental to the rule of law, such as truth, privacy, and equality.
I am currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, I worked as an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. I have a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and an A.B., magna cum laude, from Harvard College. After law school, I clerked for the Honorable Deborah L. Cook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the Honorable Nancy F. Atlas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
RESEARCH
My dissertation examines how internet technology companies shape the work of law enforcement officials responsible for gathering evidence. My future projects build on this research by developing proposals to strengthen the capacity of legal institutions to find, evaluate, and oversee evidence in a changing information environment.
I am also part of an ongoing research collaboration focused on federal courts’ disposition of disability discrimination litigation, where my work will examine how judges evaluate evidence produced by organizations.
PUBLICATIONS
Internet Technology Companies as Evidence Intermediaries, 110 Va. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024)
Creative Confluence: Lauren Edelman’s Collaborations, Law & Soc’y Rev. (forthcoming) (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)
CV
Available here.
CONTACT
Email: yfang@berkeley.edu
Twitter: @yan_fang_
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/yanfang