The UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy, in partnership with UCLA DataX, invites you to a panel discussion on cyberpunk legacies in art, industry, and policy. Featuring special guests from across UCLA, moderated by ITLP Executive Director, Professor Julia Powles.
Wednesday, January 7 | UCLA DataX (Murphy Hall) | 4:30PM-5:45PM
Please join the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy (ITLP) Research Group and the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) for Part 2 of our occasional series, “The Anatomy of a Tech Antitrust Case.” Spearheaded by ITLP-affiliated faculty member and leading antitrust lawyer, Jennifer Dixton, this series dissects what goes into investigating, litigating, and crafting remedies in today’s biggest tech monopolization and merger cases.
Anatomy of a Tech Antitrust Case (Part 2): The Role of the State Enforcer
This session will explore the role of the State enforcer, and will feature California Supervising Deputy Attorney General Stephen Smerek, a first-chair trial attorney with nearly thirty years of experience investigating and litigating complex commercial disputes in California and throughout the United States.
The discussion will explore why States are interested in Big Tech firms and their challengers, as well as the circumstances that bring States to investigate and litigate these cases, sometimes with limited resources. It will also address how proposed changes to California’s antitrust law aimed at single-firm conduct could affect tech enforcement.
The ITLP Research Group brings together faculty, students, and visitors in technology, law, and policy. Membership of the group is currently open: bit.ly/IRG_Fall2025.
Guest Speaker: Stephen Smerek
Stephen Smerek is a first-chair trial attorney with over thirty years of experience investigating and litigating complex commercial disputes in California and throughout the United States. Mr. Smerek's experience includes numerous jury and bench trials, appeals, and dispositive motions, as well as hundreds of expert and fact witness depositions and investigative hearings in a wide array of substantive areas across a broad range of industries.
Steve graduated summa cum laude from Boston University School of Law in 1993, where he was Topic and Book Review Editor of the Law Review. Steve earned numerous awards during law school, including the Dr. John Ordronaux Prize (awarded by the faculty to the student who best demonstrated both exemplary academic performance and leadership), the Alumni Academic Achievement Award (awarded for highest cumulative grade point average in the three-year study of law), as well as AmJur Awards in Contracts, Constitutional Law, Trusts & Estates, and Family Law, among other honors.
After law school, Steve clerked for the Honorable Joseph L. Tauro, then Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Following his clerkship, Steve joined Goodwin Procter in Boston, MA, where he practiced complex commercial litigation, including class action defense and intellectual property litigation, before moving to Los Angeles, CA and joining Gibson Dunn in 1999. While at Gibson Dunn, Steve played a key role in the widely followed legal malpractice litigation brought against O’Melveny & Myers by the Los Angeles Unified School District arising from development of the Belmont Learning Center in downtown Los Angeles, in which the LAUSD sought over a quarter of a billion dollars in damages and fees. After several years of litigation, and scores of fact and depositions, that litigation ended with entry of summary judgment for O’Melveny & Myers. Following successful conclusion of the litigation, the site was subsequently developed as the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center.
In 2005, Steve was recruited to join the growing Los Angeles office of Winston & Strawn as a partner by now U.S. Magistrate Judge Gail Standish. While at Winston & Strawn, Steve participated in several bench and jury trials, including a five-week patent jury trial in the Eastern District of Missouri, for which Steve took the lead on damages issues, culminating in a one-billion-dollar verdict for his client. Steve has also argued appeals in the Ninth Circuit and Federal Circuit, including a victory for client Fresh, Inc., a subsidiary of Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, in the influential and oft cited Ebner v. Fesh, Inc. decision on the “reasonable consumer standard” in the Ninth Circuit. Steve joined the Antitrust Law Section of the California Department of Justice in 2021, where he is currently a Supervising Deputy Attorney General. There Steve is lead attorney on the State of California’s antitrust case against Amazon, including arguing the successful opposition to Amazon’s demurrer and taking several apex depositions.
November 20, 2025 | 3:30-4:30pm | Law Room 1314
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 and 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 led 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.
On behalf of the UCLA School of Law and Samueli School of Engineering, the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy welcomes Professor Tim Wu to UCLA for a discussion of his forthcoming book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Knopf, 2025), in conversation with ITLP Executive Director Professor Julia Powles.
This event is co-sponsored by the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy and the Ziffren Institute for Media, Entertainment, Technology & Sports Law.
Tim Wu: Tim Wu is Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University. Hailed as the “architect” of the Biden administration’s competition and antitrust policies, Professor Wu writes and teaches about private power and related topics. First known for coining the term “net neutrality” in 2002, in recent years he has been a leader in the revitalization of American antitrust and has taken a particular focus on the growing power of the big tech platforms. From 2021 to 2023, he was appointed to serve in the White House as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. Professor Wu is the author of four other books: The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age(2018); The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016); The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires(2010), and Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (2006, with Jack Goldsmith). Professor Wu was a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and also has written for Slate, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School and B.Sc. from McGill University.
Julia Powles: Julia Powles is the Executive Director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at the UCLA School of Law and UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and Tech Policy Lead for the University-wide initiative, UCLA DataX. Professor Powles researches and teaches in the areas of privacy, intellectual property, internet governance, and the law and politics of data, automation, and artificial intelligence. Prior to joining UCLA, she was the founding Director of the UWA Tech & Policy Lab and Associate Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Western Australia. She previously held academic appointments at Cornell Tech, New York University, and the University of Cambridge, and worked at The Guardian, World Intellectual Property Organization, and MinterEllison. Professor Powles earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and B.C.L. from the University of Oxford. She also holds a B.Sc. (Hons) and LL.B. (Hons) from the Australian National University and University of Western Australia.
About the book: Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?
Tim Wu—the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase “net neutrality”—explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an Internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead. Wu frames our current moment with lessons from recent history—from generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movements—and envisions a future where technological advances can serve the greatest possible good. Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for taking back control in order to achieve a better economic balance and prosperity for all.
On behalf of the UCLA School of Law and Samueli School of Engineering, the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy welcomes Professor Ryan Calo to UCLA for a presentation on his forthcoming book, Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach (OUP, 2025).
Lunch will be provided and available for pick up at 11:30am.
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.
Join us for a research presentation by Dr. Fanna Gamal, UCLA Assistant Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, to discuss her forthcoming paper, "The Algorithmic Racial Proxy." This event is co-sponsored by UCLA DataX and the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy.
The Algorithmic Racial Proxy
California Law Review (forthcoming 2026)
About the paper:
To comply with antidiscrimination law, computer programmers tend to exclude race as a data input when constructing a machine learning algorithm. Yet scholars and advocates consistently argue that even these formally race-blind algorithms can nevertheless racially discriminate by relying on so-called “proxies for race,” or variables that have a strong correlation with race such as zip code, income, or prior criminal arrest. While a programmer wishing to respond to this argument might attempt to remove both race and all racial proxies from input data, their task is complicated by a key dilemma. That is, the definition of a racial proxy is far from obvious. In response to this dilemma, scholars, computer programmers, and advocates proffer various approaches to defining a racial proxy and solutions to the problem of racial proxy discrimination. Diverse as they are in their methodologies, these solutions share a common quality. Each relies on an underlying assumption about the relationship between race and the racial proxy, and these assumptions can have far reaching implications for the development and regulation of machine learning algorithms.
This paper examines the myriad definitions of a racial proxy proffered by courts, scholars, and state and private actors to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions that undergird beliefs about what gives a variable its “racial” character. It shows how this racial reasoning is often capricious, paradoxical, or internally inconsistent in ways that impact the regulation of algorithms. In response to the indeterminate definition of a racial proxy, the paper proposes a refocusing of the algorithmic antidiscrimination discussion away from the eventual outcome—the definition of the racial proxy—to the various political and economic processes that supply the outcome. A focus on process reveals that what is at stake in the ability to define a racial proxy is the authority to technologically embed race into the algorithms that increasingly structure human life. This ability to define racial proxies can include the power to produce new and meaningful classes of individuals that can later be exposed to differing resources, opportunities, subordination and privilege. The paper maps this process as a novel form of racial construction and a necessary site of legal thought and regulation.
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12:00 PM - Lunch
12:30 PM - Presentation
(Audience Q & A and networking to follow)
2:00 PM - Close
The Institute for Technology, Law & Policy is hosting a special off-site visit to the Wende Museum's exhibition, Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency. The event features a guided tour with Chief Curator, Joes Segal, and a group discussion on surveillance and research. Priority access for members of the ITLP Research Group.
About IRG:
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
About the Counter/Surveillance Exhibition:
In recent decades, technological advances have supercharged surveillance. Online, personal data are automatically collected and analyzed on a mass scale. Algorithms watch, listen, track, and identify people, complementing and sometimes replacing human eyes and ears. Powerful combinations of surveillance software and hardware, such as surveillance cameras outfitted with real-time facial recognition, are conquering public spaces. These technologies are often misleadingly presented as though they were pure innovation and have no history.
The exhibition Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of such surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them. It explores the precursors of current biometric surveillance in Cold War manuals for police, border guards and spies; in forensic portraiture; and in the little-known early history of computer facial recognition, revealing links between forensics, science, art, and popular culture. It also traces similarities between Cold War surveillance devices and methods used in East and West, from miniature cameras and listening devices to forensic composite kits. These not only point to a shared technical history, but are also indicative of exchange, inspiration, and imitation across the Iron Curtain. Technical exchanges with allies in the Global South ensured further international dissemination.
The exhibition includes artwork from Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Graham Fink, Ken Gonzales-Day, Damara Inglês, Yazan Khalili, Verena Kyselka, Gerhard Lang, Francisco Masó, Decebal Scriba, Liat Segal, Nedko Solakov, Xu Bing, Yang Jian, and Mail Art from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Berlin.
About the Wende Museum:
The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive that preserves history and brings it to life through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement. Wende is a German word meaning “turning point” or “change” that has come to describe the transformative period around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate the political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in the personal and social changes that will shape the future.