Professor Frank A. Pasquale

Frank Pasquale is a Professor at University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Frank Pasquale is an expert on the law of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and machine learning. He has been recognized as one of the ten most cited scholars in health law in the United States.

Pasquale frequently presents on the ethical, legal, and social implications of information technology for attorneys, physicians, and government officials. His book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015), develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance, and offers pragmatic reforms to improve the information economy. The Black Box Society has been reviewed in Science and Nature, and published in Chinese, French, Korean, and Serbian translations.

Pasquale has advised business and government leaders in the health care, internet, and finance industries, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary and Energy & Commerce Committees, the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He has also advised officials in Canada and the United Kingdom on law & technology policy.

Pasquale has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology (CITP),  Cambridge’s Center for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), and National Taiwan University. He is an affiliate fellow at Yale’s Information Society Project (ISP) and Vermont Law School’s New Economy Law Center (NELC). He has been a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School and Cardozo Law School. 

Pasquale has been recognized as one of the leaders of a global movement for “algorithmic accountability,” and co-organized one of the leading conferences on the topic in 2016. In media and communication studies, he has developed a comprehensive legal analysis of barriers to (and opportunities for) regulation of internet platforms. He keynoted the German Re:Publica conference in 2017 with a talk on “the automated public sphere,” and the Canadian Data/Power conference in 2017 with a talk on how law and policy may shape the future of journalism. In privacy law and surveillance, his work is among the leading research on regulation of algorithmic ranking, scoring, and sorting systems, including credit scoring and threat scoring.

Pasquale has researched health data policy in work that recognizes both the rapidity of technological advances and the unintended consequences of the interaction of legal rules (such as privacy, intellectual property, and antitrust laws). He has completed a trilogy of articles examining the law and policy of tiered access to care in national and international health systems, and proposing reforms. Another trilogy explored the bioethics of human enhancement from the perspective of political economy.

Pasquale has also made methodological contributions. He co-founded the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy of Law, which has sponsored five major workshops since 2012. His work on health care and education finance has illuminated the power of private sector intermediaries in each to influence public policy in underexplored ways (such as budgetary and accounting rules). His work has also advanced the modernization of economic analysis of law, including improvements in the valuation of intellectual property.