About

My name is Przemysław (Przemek) Pałka, I’m an Assistant Professor of Law at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, serving as PI in the Private Law of Data project funded by Norway Grants. 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 and philosophy. I’m broadly interested in questions about the ways in which the law contributes to the the emergence of the information society, as well the normative and conceptual challenges that the socio-technological transformations bring to law. In particular, I’m interested in private and economic law (property, contract, consumer law, data protection); data analytics, artificial intelligence, virtual goods; and the prospects for automation of certain legal tasks. I’m also quickly developing an interest in law and cognitive sciences.

In 2018-2020 I was Yale’s Fellow in Private Law, helping to manage the Yale Law School Center for Private Law, directed by Prof. 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 Prof. Jack Balkin, Prof. Rebecca Crootof and Nikolas Guggenberger.  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 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: Prof. Hans Micklitz and Prof. 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 blog : ) 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!). I blog about things on my mind, to the varying degree of seriousness.