{"id":"7b370142-e029-48f8-b7ba-584cc7bb0612","slug":"harry-surden","name":"Harry Surden","bioBrief":"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.\n\nSurden'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).\n\nHe 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.\n\nHis 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).","priorExits":null,"nationality":"American","verificationPosture":"verified","aliases":["Harry Surden","Professor Harry Surden","H. Surden"],"sources":[{"url":"https://www.colorado.edu/law/harry-surden","title":"Harry Surden — Faculty profile","sourceName":"University of Colorado Law School"},{"url":"https://law.stanford.edu/directory/harry-surden/","title":"Harry Surden — Stanford CodeX affiliate","sourceName":"Stanford Law School"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=553550","title":"SSRN author page","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://lawweb.colorado.edu/files/vitae/surden.pdf","title":"Harry Surden CV (Colorado Law)","sourceName":"University of Colorado Law School"},{"url":"https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YBuBwXEAAAAJ&hl=en","title":"Harry Surden - Google Scholar profile","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://siliconflatirons.org/people/harry-surden/","title":"Harry Surden - Silicon Flatirons","sourceName":"Silicon Flatirons Center"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2417415","title":"Machine Learning and Law (2014)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3411869","title":"Artificial Intelligence and Law: An Overview (2019)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4779694","title":"ChatGPT, AI Large Language Models, and Law (2024)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5135305","title":"AI and Law: LLM Technological Changes (2025)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3686055","title":"Machine Learning and Law: An Overview (2021)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://law.stanford.edu/publications/machine-learning-and-law/","title":"Machine Learning and Law - Stanford Law School listing","sourceName":"Stanford Law School"},{"url":"https://www.colorado.edu/law/about/contact-us/directories/resident-faculty-directory/harry-surden","title":"Harry Surden - Colorado Law faculty directory","sourceName":"Colorado Law"},{"url":"https://www.harrysurden.com/wordpress/about","title":"Stanford CodeX Center for Legal Informatics: Associate Director (2023)","sourceName":"Stanford CodeX Center for Legal Informatics"},{"url":"https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/gsulr/vol35/iss4/8/","title":"Artificial intelligence and law: An overview (2019) — Georgia State University Law Review 35 · cited by 1200","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2216254","title":"Computable Contracts (2012) — UC Davis Law Review 46 · cited by 308","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2747491","title":"Technological opacity, predictability, and self-driving cars (2016) — Cardozo Law Review 38 · cited by 264","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol60/iss4/8/","title":"Structural rights in privacy (2007) — SMU Law Review 60 · cited by 148","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4626015","title":"ChatGPT, AI large language models, and law (2023) — Fordham Law Review 92 · cited by 101","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3441303","title":"Ethics of AI in law: Basic questions (2020) — Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI · cited by 94","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol68/iss4/6/","title":"Efficient uncertainty in patent interpretation (2011) — Washington & Lee Law Review 68 · cited by 57","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1692279","title":"The variable determinacy thesis (2011) — Columbia Science & Technology Law Review 12 · cited by 57","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9721160","title":"Values embedded in legal artificial intelligence (2022) — IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 41 · cited by 48","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9226403","title":"AI loyalty: a new paradigm for aligning stakeholder interests (2020) — IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 1 · cited by 46","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4790803","title":"Artificial intelligence and constitutional interpretation (2025) — University of Colorado Law Review 96 · cited by 43","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v27/27HarvJLTech135.pdf","title":"Technological Cost as Law in Intellectual Property (2013) — Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 27 · cited by 33","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2784465","title":"How self-driving cars work (2016) — SSRN 2784465 · cited by 11","sourceName":"Google Scholar"}],"reviewStatus":"reviewed","createdAt":"2026-08-25T23:24:42.381Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-26T01:02:23.887Z","educations":[{"id":"ce8a0b69-e3ce-44f1-94b4-35829b5a3929","personId":"7b370142-e029-48f8-b7ba-584cc7bb0612","institution":"Stanford Law School","degree":"J.D.","startYear":null,"endYear":2005,"createdAt":"2026-08-25T23:38:11.357Z"},{"id":"80e3729f-b2e5-458e-82fd-dd6745b6aa03","personId":"7b370142-e029-48f8-b7ba-584cc7bb0612","institution":"Cornell University","degree":"B.A. Government (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa)","startYear":null,"endYear":1995,"createdAt":"2026-08-25T23:38:11.357Z"}],"companyRoles":[{"id":"ab4b7946-16dc-44fb-aff2-75cdcb921b37","personId":"7b370142-e029-48f8-b7ba-584cc7bb0612","companyId":"3a9fc1b5-eeab-4e5b-835a-f9326e73b4e0","role":"researcher","roleTitle":"Professor of Law","startDate":null,"endDate":null,"currentRole":true,"roleBasis":"verified_secondary","createdAt":"2026-08-25T23:24:43.154Z","company":{"slug":"university-of-colorado-law-school","name":"University of Colorado Law School"}},{"id":"12d4ea56-55ca-4d39-9cb5-d44e0adfb3ba","personId":"7b370142-e029-48f8-b7ba-584cc7bb0612","companyId":"6fa6b30c-571e-42e1-bf74-63980f8e3b5c","role":"researcher","roleTitle":"We Robot speaker / participant","startDate":null,"endDate":null,"currentRole":false,"roleBasis":"verified_secondary","createdAt":"2026-08-26T02:01:39.174Z","company":{"slug":"we-robot-conference","name":"We Robot"}}],"boardRoles":[],"investorRoles":[],"foundings":[]}