Ryan Calo

Ryan Calo is the Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor at the University of Washington School of Law (also credited as the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor in earlier faculty listings), with joint appointments at the UW Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. He is a co-founder of the UW Tech Policy Lab (2013), the UW Center for an Informed Public, and Society + Technology at UW. Before Washington, he directed privacy and robotics research at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, where he founded the Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving initiative; he previously practiced privacy law as an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., clerked for the Hon. R. Guy Cole on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and investigated police misconduct in New York City after earning his B.A. in philosophy from Dartmouth (1999) and his J.D. from the University of Michigan (2005).

Calo is widely regarded as a foundational scholar of robotics law. His 2015 California Law Review article "Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw" (103 Cal. L. Rev. 513) argued that robots present a legally distinctive combination of embodiment, emergent behavior, and social valence that will demand its own body of doctrine, in the way the internet did a generation earlier; it remains one of the most-cited pieces in the field. He built the intellectual runway for that argument in earlier works including "Robots and Privacy" (in Robot Ethics, MIT Press, 2012) and "The Boundaries of Privacy Harm" (86 Ind. L.J. 1131, 2011), which distinguishes subjective from objective privacy harms and is a standard citation in privacy-law syllabi.

His subsequent scholarship traces the collision between machine learning and public power. "Artificial Intelligence Policy: A Primer and Roadmap" (51 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 399, 2017) is a widely assigned map of the AI-policy terrain; "The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis of Legitimacy" (with Danielle Citron, 70 Emory L.J. 797, 2021) argues that algorithmic decision-making inside agencies threatens the legal foundations of administrative authority; "Modeling Through" (Duke L.J., 2022) examines how governments use models as a form of governance; and "Distinguishing Privacy Law" (Colum. L. Rev., 2024) reworks the field's conceptual boundaries. He co-organizes the annual We Robot conference (which he helped launch in 2012) and chaired the 2022 edition. His recent books include Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach (Oxford University Press, 2025) and, as co-editor, Robot Law: Volume II (2025) and The Cambridge Handbook of Generative AI and the Law (2025).

Calo has testified before the U.S. Senate four times: on drones before the Judiciary Committee (March 2016), on augmented reality before the Commerce Committee (November 16, 2016), on COVID-19 data applications, and most recently on July 11, 2024, before the Senate Commerce Committee on "The Need to Protect Americans' Privacy and the AI Accelerant." He serves on the board of the R Street Institute and on advisory boards for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Future of Privacy Forum, and the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, and is an affiliate scholar at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. He has been named UW Law's Phillip A. Trautman 1L Professor of the Year twice (2014, 2017) and received the Washington Law Review Faculty Award in 2019.