{"id":"03f1225b-a1a4-452e-831f-2bb3f9fee124","slug":"ryan-calo","name":"Ryan Calo","bioBrief":"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).\n\nCalo 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.\n\nHis 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).\n\nCalo 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.","priorExits":null,"nationality":"American","verificationPosture":"verified","aliases":["M. Ryan Calo","Michael Ryan Calo"],"sources":[{"url":"https://www.law.uw.edu/directory/faculty/calo-ryan","title":"Ryan Calo — Faculty profile","sourceName":"University of Washington School of Law"},{"url":"https://techpolicylab.uw.edu/people/ryan-calo/","title":"Ryan Calo — Tech Policy Lab","sourceName":"UW Tech Policy Lab"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1010097","title":"SSRN author page","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Calo","title":"Ryan Calo — Wikipedia","sourceName":"Wikipedia"},{"url":"https://techpolicylab.uw.edu/","title":"UW Tech Policy Lab (co-founder)","sourceName":"Tech Policy Lab"},{"url":"https://www.rstreet.org/people/ryan-calo/","title":"Ryan Calo — R Street Institute board bio","sourceName":"R Street Institute"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2402972","title":"Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw (SSRN)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3015350","title":"Artificial Intelligence Policy: A Primer and Roadmap (SSRN)","sourceName":"SSRN"},{"url":"https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol86/iss3/8/","title":"The Boundaries of Privacy Harm — Indiana Law Journal","sourceName":"Indiana Law Journal"},{"url":"https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk15026/files/media/documents/51-2_Calo.pdf","title":"AI Policy: A Primer and Roadmap — UC Davis Law Review PDF","sourceName":"UC Davis Law Review"},{"url":"https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/379B1E45-CACB-4A94-A3B6-42368B2FA0EA","title":"Prepared written Senate testimony (drones)","sourceName":"U.S. Senate Commerce Committee"},{"url":"https://www.law.uw.edu/news-events/news/2024/calo-senate-committee-testimony","title":"UW Law announcement: 2024 Senate testimony","sourceName":"UW School of Law"},{"url":"https://techpolicylab.uw.edu/news/director-calo-testifies-ar-senate/","title":"Director Calo Testifies on AR Before U.S. Senate","sourceName":"UW Tech Policy Lab"},{"url":"https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/","title":"UW Law Digital Commons — Calo faculty articles","sourceName":"UW Digital Commons"},{"url":"https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/boundaries-privacy-harm-659540c250a93208327675e7/","title":"Stanford CIS — Calo publications","sourceName":"Stanford Center for Internet and Society"},{"url":"https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/31/qa-ryan-calo-law-professor-and-interdisciplinary-researcher-talks-about-his-new-book-law-and-technology/","title":"UW News Q&A on Law and Technology (2026)","sourceName":"UW News"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1599189","title":"Robots and Privacy (2011) — Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (MIT Press) · cited by 267","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://www.commerce.senate.gov/meetings/exploring-augmented-reality/","title":"U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation: Witness, first congressional hearing on augmented reality ('Exploring Augmented Reality') (2016)","sourceName":"U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation"},{"url":"https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/3629/feed_items/2200698","title":"White House Frontiers Conference: Invited AI-policy expert (Obama Administration convening) (2016)","sourceName":"White House Frontiers Conference"},{"url":"https://live.worldbank.org/en/experts/r/ryan-calo","title":"World Bank: Appointed reviewer, privacy appeals panel (2022)","sourceName":"World Bank"},{"url":"https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/","title":"Stanford Law School, Center for Internet and Society: Affiliate scholar (previously Residential Fellow directing privacy and robotics) (2020)","sourceName":"Stanford Law School, Center for Internet and Society"},{"url":"https://www.washington.edu/news/2015/07/13/robotics-and-the-law-when-software-can-harm-you/","title":"UW News: Robotics and the law: When software can harm you (2015)","sourceName":"UW News"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2309703","title":"Digital Market Manipulation (2013) — George Washington Law Review · cited by 1155","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06318","title":"Artificial intelligence and life in 2030: the one hundred year study on artificial intelligence (2022) — arXiv preprint · cited by 1033","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/538311a","title":"There is a blind spot in AI research (2016) — Nature · cited by 974","sourceName":"Google Scholar"},{"url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2929643","title":"The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power (2017) — Columbia Law Review · cited by 774","sourceName":"Google 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