Kate Klonick

“Everyone wanted diversity for the board, but it was really unclear as to how on Earth you have diversity over an entire globe with only 40 people on the entire board.”

Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor at Law at St. John’s University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her current research focuses on the development of Facebook’s new Oversight Board — an independent body that will hear user appeals from Facebook users and advise the platform about its online speech policies. Thanks to individual grants from the Knight Foundation, Charles Koch Institute, and MacArthur Foundation, she has amassed over 100+ hours of interviews and embedded research with the Governance Team at Facebook that is creating the Board. The results of this research will be published in a law review article in the Yale Law Journal in 2020, but available in draft form online in late 2019.

Kate holds a  JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Editor at The Georgetown Law Journal and the Founding Editor of the The Georgetown Law Journal Online; and a PhD from Yale Law School where she studied under Jack Balkin, Tom Tyler, and Josh Knobe.  Between law school and her time at Yale, she clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York.

She has a background in cognitive psychology which she apply to the study of emerging issues in law and technology. Specifically, this has included research and work on the Internet’s effect on freedom of expression and private platform governance. Kate also writes and works on issues related to online shaming, artificial intelligence, robotics, content moderation, algorithms, privacy, and intellectual property.

Her work on these topics has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Lawfare, Vox, The Guardian and numerous other publications.