Ignacio Cofone

Ignacio Cofone is Professor of Law and Regulation of AI, working at the Faculty of Law and the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a governing body fellow of Reuben College. He is also an affiliated fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Quebec AI Institute. Before joining Oxford, he was the Canada Research Chair in AI Law and Data Governance at McGill University.

Ignacio’s research examines how law and regulation should respond to social and economic changes driven by AI; in particular how to govern harms produced by machine inferences. His recent book, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy (CUP 2023), argues that AI requires restructuring privacy and data protection law based on duties of non-exploitation because basing these bodies of law on individual control has become ineffective. His current research projects examine how to prevent and remedy nonmaterial and relational AI harms, and on using comparative analysis to design regulatory frameworks that promote accountable AI. Updated details on his publications are available on SSRN and Google Scholar.

Ignacio has been appointed for visiting teaching and research positions at NYU School of Law, Paris Panthéon-Assas, University of St Gallen, Bar-Ilan University, Tilburg University, and Torcuato Di Tella University and advises governments, courts, and other organizations on applying and adapting law and regulation to AI—such as by working with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on an overhaul of Canadian privacy law. He obtained doctorates from Yale Law School (JSD) and from Hamburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam (joint PhD, rer. pol.), as well as common law and civil law degrees. He is happy to supervise doctoral and postdoctoral candidates (who should apply directly through the graduate studies office without prior authorization), particularly from scholars with interdisciplinary or comparative law proposals related to the governance of inference-based harms.