About

My name is Przemysław Pałka, I’m an assistant professor of law at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where I teach methodology of legal scholarship, law and technology, and serve as the PI in two projects: Consumer Law and the Attention Economy (NCN Poland) and Private Law of Data  (Norway Grants, completed). I’m also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale.

In my research, I concentrate on the intersections of law, technology, society, psychology, and philosophy. I’m broadly interested in the ways in which the law contributes to sociotechnological changes, as well as the normative and conceptual challenges that these transformations bring the law. In particular, I’m interested in private and regulatory law in the context of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and mental health and well-being. At the same time, I study opportunities technology presents to law enforcement, specifically the prospects for automated analysis of terms of service and privacy policies.

Before joining Jagiellonian, I was Yale’s Fellow in Private Law (2018-2020), helping to manage the Yale Law School Center for Private Law, directed by Daniel Markovits. We organized the Seminar in Private Law, in 2018 devoted to private law and technology, and in 2019 to private law and inequality. During that time I was also a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale, directed by Jack Balkin. Before joining Yale, I was a Research Associate at the Law Department of the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. I coordinated and contributed to two projects concerning the intersection of consumer law, personal data protection law, and artificial intelligence: CLAUDETTE, trying to automate the legal evaluation of terms of service and privacy policies using machine learning; and ARTSY, mapping the challenges to the EU consumer and data protection laws stemming from business’s use of AI (PIs: Hans Micklitz and Giovanni Sartor. Previously, I have been a PhD researcher at the EUI, where I have written and defended the doctoral dissertation titled Virtual Property: Towards a General Theory (available in Open Access). For a full list of my publications, see here.

The title of the website : ) is a play on words – my full name, Przemyslaw, finishes with LAW – and I work on law and technology; while the first part, depending on transliteration, can either be “przemysł” (pol. industry) or “przemyśl” (pol. think through!).