October 27, 2025 | 3:30-4:30pm | Law Room 2477

As a lead-up to Prof. Ryan Calo's visit and book talk on November 7, the ITLP Research Group is hosting a reading and discussion of Calo's latest book Law & Technology: A Methodical Approach.

Ryan Calo’s new book is available here. (UCLA students and faculty must be logged into campus wi-fi or VPN to view). Before the IRG meeting, please read Chapter 2: The Scale and the Reactor. In order to prepare for a lively discussion, please come ready with one point that you found particularly notable, fascinating, or surprising and one open-ended question to prompt group discussion. The discussion will be lead by ITLP Fellow Dr. Nina Toft Djanegara.

The ITLP Research Group (IRG) is a fortnightly meeting of tech law and engineering faculty and students, visiting scholars, and tech and society researchers from across the UCLA community.

The IRG provides a forum to present and discuss new scholarship and works-in-progress at the intersection of technology, law, and policy. UCLA students and faculty interested in joining IRG for Fall 2025 can request invitation by submitting this form: bit.ly/IRG_Fall2025

Ryan Calo: Ryan Calo is Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor of Law at the University of Washington's School of Law and a professor at the Information School, having worked at the intersection of law and technology for over a decade. Professor Calo is the cofounder of two interdisciplinary research institutions at the University focusing on technology policy and the study of misinformation, and has chaired a university-wide President and Provost task force on technology and society. He also cofounded the leading North American conference on robotics and artificial intelligence law and has testified before the United States Senate about technology four times. Professor Calo earned his J.D. from the University of Michigan and B.A. from Dartmouth College.

About the book: Technology is difficult to study, let alone regulate. While law is uniquely positioned to channel technology toward human flourishing, technology poses special challenges to law and governance, obscuring human will and responsibility, stalling regulatory action, and putting rights and values into constant defense. The consequences can be dire. The United States spent three decades without a plan for nuclear waste disposal and still lacks comprehensive privacy laws many years into the information revolution. Law and technology as a field, meanwhile, has yet to cohere.

In light of these challenges, Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach offers a defensible and consistent approach to the legal analysis of technology, one capable of navigating technology's capacity to confuse and confound. Ryan Calo puts forward a step-by-step methodology for thinking about and ultimately challenging technology to meet society's demands. The book demonstrates that, no less than health law or law and economics, law and technology deserves a field of its own. To this end, it helps formalize legal analysis of physical and digital artifacts and systems, sowing the seeds for the concept of law and technology itself.