Ignacio Cofone is Professor of Law and Regulation of AI at Oxford, working jointly at the Faculty of Law and the Institute for Ethics in AI. He is also an Official Fellow of Reuben College and an Affiliated Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project. Before joining Oxford, he was the Canada Research Chair in AI Law and Data Governance at McGill University.
Cofone’s research examines how the law can and should adapt to AI-driven social and economic changes. His book, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy, argues that AI requires restructuring privacy and data protection law based on the duties that we owe one another as members of a society—typically captured by extracontractual obligations—because basing these bodies of law on individual consent and control has become ineffective. His current research project focuses on how to prevent and redress nonmaterial AI harms and on fostering human-centred AI innovation.
Cofone holds common law and civil law degrees, a JSD from Yale Law School, and a joint PhD [rerum politicarum] from Hamburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has advised governments, courts, and other organizations on how to adjust law and regulation in view of AI. He actively welcomes applications for doctoral and postdoctoral supervision at the Institute, particularly but not only from scholars with an interdisciplinary background.