Dan Hunter

Professor of Law
Director, Institute for Information Law & Policy

Dan Hunter is an expert in internet law, intellectual property, and artificial intelligence and cognitive science models of law. He joins the New York Law School faculty from the University of Melbourne Law School (Australia) and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University on the nature of legal reasoning, as well as computer science and law degrees from Monash University (Australia) and a Master in Laws from the University of Melbourne.

He held a Chair in Law at the University of Melbourne and was a tenured faculty member at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, from 2000-2007, and where he received the Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2000, and where he still teaches as an adjunct faculty member. Prior to joining Wharton he taught on the law faculty at Cambridge University.

He regularly publishes on issues dealing with the intersection of computers and law, including papers dealing with the regulation of virtual worlds, the use of artificial intelligence in law, and high technology aspects of intellectual property. His research has appeared in journals such as the California Law Review (three times), the Texas Law Review, the William & Mary Law Review, and the Journal of Legal Education. He is the co-author of one book (Building Intelligent Legal Information Systems, Kluwer 1994), is a judge for the resolution of domain name disputes for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and is on the editorial board of numerous journals. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Australian Research Council. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, a Herchel Smith Research Fellowship in Intellectual Property Law, and a Science Commons Fellowship.

He was one of the first scholars to examine the social significance of virtual worlds, co-founded the scholarly blog Terra Nova (terranova.blogs.com), and ran the 2006 State of Play/Terra Nova Conference at New York Law School, and the 2007 State of Play Conference in Singapore. He will convene the 2009 conference back in New York.

His current projects include examination of the economics and laws relating to user-generated content, and the social significance of luxury handbags.