Frank Pasquale
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Frank Pasquale is a professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech whose scholarship examines the law of AI, algorithms and machine learning. His books include The Black Box Society (2015) and New Laws of Robotics (2020), addressing the governance of automated systems and the institutions that use them.[1]
Roles and affiliations
Cornell's biography records earlier professorships at Maryland, Seton Hall and Brooklyn Law School. Pasquale has also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI and written on administrative law. His research connects information law with questions of professional responsibility and the organization of economic activity.[1]
Contributions and positions
Opacity and responsibility
The Black Box Society examines information systems affecting reputation, search and finance. Cornell describes the book as combining analysis of those institutions with proposed reforms. Its subject is not simply whether an algorithm can be explained technically, but the governance of organizations whose information practices affect other people.[1]
New laws of robotics
In an authorized excerpt from New Laws of Robotics, Pasquale proposes principles directed at the people and institutions building AI. He favors technologies that support professional work, cautions against systems that obscure whether a person is interacting with a human, opposes escalating destructive technological competition, and calls for identifiable parties responsible for automated systems.[2]
These are normative proposals, not enacted statutes or descriptions of universal legal duties. The excerpt argues that the future of work depends on choices about investment, professional standards and regulation. It distinguishes beneficial substitution for dangerous or degrading work from indiscriminate replacement of skilled human judgment. Law and public policy, in this account, help determine how automation changes occupations.[2]
AI and legal judgment
In Cornell's coverage of his recent scholarship, Pasquale discusses risks from generative AI in legal reasoning, including inaccurate outputs, instability and sensitivity to prompts. He argues that automated tools should not replace the core judicial task of understanding and evaluating the parties' arguments. Where such tools are used, his position emphasizes understanding their limits and preserving human judgment.[3]
The same institutional account describes research on AI assessment of workers, benefit claims, compensation for creators and automated legal systems. Those subjects connect the treatment of AI as a workplace tool with questions about evidence, accountability and access to justice. The positions reported are Pasquale's scholarly views, rather than binding judicial rules.[3]
Selected works
- The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015) — book; public bibliographic description.[1]
- New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (2020) — book; authorized excerpt, not the complete text.[2]
Coverage
AI and Legal Scholarship in Cornell's FORUM reports on Pasquale's research and his concerns about delegating legal judgment to generative systems. It is institutional reporting, separate from his authored publications.[3]
Related articles
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Cornell Law School, Frank Pasquale, faculty biography. Accessed September 12, 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Frank Pasquale, The New Laws of Robotics, Brooklyn Law Notes, Spring 2021, authorized excerpt from the 2020 book. Accessed September 12, 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Cornell Law School FORUM, AI and Legal Scholarship, institutional coverage. Accessed September 12, 2026.