Bryant Walker Smith

Bryant Walker Smith is an Associate Professor of Law at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law and a courtesy faculty member in the College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina. He is also an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, where he previously led the legal aspects of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford's automated driving program. In 2025 he served as a visiting professor at Renmin University of China. Trained as both a transportation engineer and a lawyer, Smith combines the two disciplines to advise cities, states, national governments, and the United Nations on automated driving, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies.

Smith made his reputation with a pair of foundational papers that framed the first decade of automated-driving law. His 2013 study "Automated Vehicles Are Probably Legal in the United States" (published as a report and later in law review form) remains the most-cited legal analysis of whether self-driving vehicles may lawfully be sold and operated on public roads, and it shaped how state legislatures, DOT, and industry approached the question. He was a coauthor of the SAE J3016 taxonomy that produced the widely used Levels 0 through 5 of driving automation, a framework that has become the vocabulary of the entire industry and its regulators. Related early work, including "A Legal Perspective on Three Misconceptions in Vehicle Automation" (2014) and "Proximity-Driven Liability" (2013, Georgetown Law Journal), pushed the debate past capability myths and into product liability and post-sale duties.

His government service includes vice-chairing the US Department of Transportation's Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee (successor advisory work to the earlier Advisory Committee on Automation in Transportation), testifying before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (most recently at the February 2026 hearing "Hit the Road, Mac: The Future of Self-Driving Cars"), serving as an expert witness for the State of California, and drafting the Uniform Law Commission's model law on automated driving. He taught what is widely credited as the first law school course dedicated to automated driving, at Stanford in 2012, and clerked for Judge Evan J. Wallach of the US Court of International Trade.

Smith's current work concentrates on the gap between what automated-driving companies claim and what their systems actually do. His forthcoming Drake Law Review article "'Self-Driving' Means Self-Driving" (2026) argues that Tesla's marketing of "Full Self-Driving" is legally actionable misrepresentation, and his forthcoming Southern California Law Review piece "Regulating Robotaxis" (with Matthew Wansley) sets out a regulatory architecture for commercial driverless services. Other recent scholarship includes "Ideal Enforcement" in the Michigan Technology Law Review (2024, with Jeffrey Michael and Johnathon Ehsani) and "Dall-E Does Palsgraf" in the Case Western Reserve Journal of Law, Technology and the Internet (2023). He publishes and archives his work at newlypossible.org.