Anu Bradford

Scholarship · Comparative regulation

Anu Bradford is a Columbia Law School scholar of European Union law and digital regulation. Her work examines how major jurisdictions shape technology markets and how regulatory choices interact with innovation. She is the author of The Brussels Effect and Digital Empires, and has written specifically about the disputed relationship between digital regulation and technological progress.

Roles and affiliations

Bradford is the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization and directs Columbia's European Legal Studies Center. Her faculty biography records earlier work at the University of Chicago and legal practice in Brussels involving EU and antitrust law. Her research spans European regulation, international trade and comparative competition law.

Contributions and positions

Comparative digital governance

The Brussels Effect (2020) examines the EU's influence on markets beyond its borders. Digital Empires (2023) compares competing approaches to governing the digital economy in the United States, China and the European Union. The latter situates technology regulation within international competition over institutions and values, rather than treating it as a collection of isolated national rules.

Regulation and innovation

In The False Choice Between Digital Regulation and Innovation (2024), Bradford challenges the inference that the United States' stronger technology sector proves the superiority of less stringent regulation. She argues that differences in legal and institutional environments require closer examination before attributing Europe's position to its privacy, antitrust or other digital rules.

The article seeks to redirect policy debate toward the costs and benefits of particular interventions and the conditions that support innovation. Its claim is not that every regulatory requirement is beneficial. Rather, it disputes an automatic tradeoff under which protecting rights necessarily means surrendering technological progress. That distinction is relevant to debates about the EU AI Act and the competitiveness of European AI development.

Selected works

• The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020) — book; publication information is available in the Columbia bibliography.
• Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (2023) — book; the same bibliography provides an accessible description, rather than the complete text.
• The False Choice Between Digital Regulation and Innovation (2024) — journal abstract and downloadable article.

Coverage and scholarly response

In a March 2025 JOTWELL review, Tal Zarsky discusses Bradford's attention to regulatory complexity, access to capital, insolvency rules and the recruitment of talent. He describes her article as an intervention in a causal debate, while emphasizing that the empirical relationship between privacy regulation and innovation remains contested.

Zarsky distinguishes technological innovation from wider social benefits and notes that rules can affect the direction as well as the amount of innovation. His review connects the argument to AI and highlights the need for further empirical research. This is a separate scholar's assessment of Bradford's work, not a finding that any particular AI rule has been proved to help or hinder development.

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