Harry Surden

Harry Surden is a Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, where he has taught since 2008, and Associate Director of Stanford Law School's CodeX Center for Legal Informatics. His scholarship sits at the intersection of computer science and law: artificial intelligence and law, legal informatics and legal automation (including machine learning and law), autonomous systems and self-driving cars, computable contracts, and intellectual property (particularly patent law) and information privacy. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the AI Initiative at the University of Colorado's Silicon Flatirons Center.

Surden's background is unusual for a legal academic. He worked as a professional software engineer at Bloomberg L.P. from 1995 to 1999 and then at Cisco Systems from 2000 to 2001 before attending Stanford Law School (J.D. 2005, with honors), where he received the Stanford Law School Intellectual Property Writing Award. He clerked for the Honorable Martin J. Jenkins on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2005-06 and then spent two years (2006-08) as a fellow at Stanford's CodeX Center before joining Colorado. His undergraduate degree is a B.A. in Government from Cornell University (1995, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa).

He is best known for a small set of foundational articles that helped define AI-and-law as a modern field. "Machine Learning and Law," 89 Washington Law Review 87 (2014), was one of the earliest law-review treatments explaining, in terms lawyers could use, how supervised learning changes what tasks can be automated in legal work; it has become one of the most-cited articles in the subfield. "Computable Contracts," 46 U.C. Davis Law Review 629 (2012), introduced the concept for which he is most closely associated: contract terms represented in a form that computers can directly evaluate, an idea that has since propagated into work on smart contracts and financial regulation. "Technological Opacity, Predictability, and Self-Driving Cars," 38 Cardozo Law Review 121 (2016), co-authored with Mary-Anne Williams, framed the tort-law and regulatory problem of black-box autonomy years before it became a mainstream policy issue. "Artificial Intelligence and Law: An Overview," 35 Georgia State University Law Review 1306 (2019), is now a standard classroom text.

His current work concentrates on the legal implications of generative AI and large language models: recent pieces include "ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models, and Law" (Fordham Law Review, 2024) and "Artificial Intelligence and Law: An Overview of Recent Technological Changes in Large Language Models and Law" (Colorado Law Review, 2025), alongside chapters on the ethics of legal AI in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (2020) and on computable law in the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Private Law (2023). He has presented on GPT-4 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (July 2023) and served as an invited speaker to the Federal Communications Commission's Technical Advisory Committee on AI ethics (August 2020). Colorado awarded him the Provost's Faculty Achievement Award for Tenured Faculty (2018-19), the Gilbert Goldstein Research Fellowship (2020-21), and the Austin Scott Honorary Lecture (2022).