Matthew Wansley

Matthew Wansley is a Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, where he studies the intersection of law, technology, and corporate governance. His scholarship focuses on how regulators should confront emerging technologies whose risks are large, novel, and poorly understood: automated driving in particular, but also fracking, e-cigarettes, and the venture-backed startups that commercialize these technologies. He teaches Contracts, Corporations, Torts, Venture Capital, and AI and the Law (cardozo.yu.edu ↗).

Before joining Cardozo, Wansley was General Counsel of nuTonomy, the MIT self-driving startup that ran the first public robotaxi pilot in Singapore and was later acquired by Aptiv (now Motional). That operating experience anchors his AV-safety writing. He also served as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and clerked for judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School (2010) and a B.A. from Yale University (cardozo.yu.edu ↗).

His most cited work sits at two poles. On the technology-regulation side, "Regulation of Emerging Risks" (Vanderbilt L. Rev., 2016) built an experimentalist framework applied to fracking, e-cigarettes, and autonomous vehicles; "The End of Accidents" (UC Davis L. Rev., 2021) proposed strict, no-fault liability for AV operators in every crash involving contact; "Regulating Driving Automation Safety" (Emory L.J., 2024) reworked NHTSA's authority into a workable AV-safety regime; and "Regulating Robotaxis" (S. Cal. L. Rev., 2026), co-authored with Bryant Walker Smith, offers a blueprint for licensing driverless fleets. On the corporate-law side, "Taming Unicorns" (Indiana L.J., 2022), "Risk-Seeking Governance" (Vanderbilt L. Rev., 2023), "Venture Predation" (J. Corp. L., 2023), "Coopting Disruption" (BU L. Rev., 2025), and "No Exit" (NYU L. Rev., 2025) trace how venture capital, late-stage private companies, and incumbents warp competition and safety incentives. "No Exit" was voted one of the Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles of 2025 (scholar.google.com ↗).

Wansley is one of the most quoted academic voices on AV regulation in the general-interest press. He was a lead outside expert cited by The New York Times on California's 2023 suspension of Cruise's driverless permits, telling the Times that "companies should be judged by their on-road safety performance" and that Cruise "could have survived this if they had been honest" (slate.com ↗). He has been quoted by The Washington Post on NHTSA's expanding investigation of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, arguing that Tesla's camera-only sensor posture is "a bit of an outlier" that warrants federal scrutiny (cardozo.yu.edu ↗). He is a member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ecgi.global ↗).