Kate Klonick

Prof. / PhD / JD

CV

I am an Associate Professor of Law at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. For the 2022-2023 academic year I will be in residence as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Rebooting Social Media Initiative.

My research focuses on private governance of online speech. My most recent work in this area focused on the development of Facebook's new Oversight Board, the independent body that hears appeals on content from Facebook users and advises the platform about its online speech policies. The results of this research were published in a feature in the Yale Law Journal in June 2020 and The New Yorker in February 2021.

I hold a  JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where I was a Senior Editor at The Georgetown Law Journal and the Founding Editor of the The Georgetown Law Journal Online; and a PhD from Yale Law School where I studied under Jack Balkin, Tom Tyler, and Josh Knobe. Between law school and my time at Yale, I clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York. Before attending law school, I worked as a journalist in New York City. This background, as well as my training in cognitive psychology and U.S. history, inform my methodological approach to researching emerging issues in law and technology.

In addition to online speech and governance, I write and work on issues related to property, online shaming, content moderation, algorithms, privacy, and intellectual property. My work on these topics has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Georgetown Law JournalMaryland Law Review, New YorkerNew York TimesWashington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, LawfareVoxThe Guardian and numerous other publications.