Bridget Fahey is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Her research in constitutional law focuses on the theory and practice of American federalism, especially how our domestic governments interact in unexpected ways and use unorthodox legal tools to structure their joint projects. Her forthcoming co-authored article Layered Constitutionalism and Structural Interdependency, 124 Colum. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024), identifies and theorizes a largely hidden body of federal constitutional rules that shape—in ways expected and unexpected—state structural choices.

Her earlier article Coordinated Rulemaking and Cooperative Federalism’s Administrative State, 132 Yale L.J. 1213 (2023), argues that cooperative federalism programs have given rise to a distinctive administrative state—with forms of administrative action and legal frameworks that diverge in important respects from ordinary federal and state administrative law. The Article illustrates this point by identifying a distinctive form of legislative rulemaking—“coordinated rulemaking”—which is widely used in cooperative federalism programs, but cannot be assimilated into familiar administrative law frameworks. Her article Data Federalism, 135 Harv. L. Rev. 1107 (2022), uncovers a vast intergovernmental market in private data exchanged by federal, state, and local governments, and the unusual cross-governmental bureaucracies that govern that market. Both pieces expound on the insight she first developed in Federalism by Contract, 129 Yale L.J. 2326 (2020), which demonstrated that the federal government and states use contract-like instruments to structure intergovernmental programs and transact in a wide range of governmental powers. Before joining the faculty, her article Consent Procedures and American Federalism, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 1561 (2015), identified and theorized the federal government’s practice of using cooperative federalism programs to intervene in and reshape state and local governing processes.

Professor Fahey is also interested in the government stewardship of private data. Building on Data Federalism, her cross-disciplinary work funded by a grant from the Neubauer Collegium aims to develop a descriptive and conceptual understanding of the legal-technical architectures that shape of how data moves between—and is controlled by—our domestic governments.

Professor Fahey received a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty, she was a litigator at the Washington DC office of WilmerHale, held a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was a law clerk on the DC Circuit and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier in her career, Professor Fahey worked as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and Berlin.

She teaches 1L Contracts and Constitutional Law, co-coordinates the Public Law Workshop, and has taught informal Greenberg Seminars on eclectic topics including Space Law, Order Without Law, Free Speech on Campus, and others.

Raul Castro Fernandez is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. In his research he builds systems for discovering, preparing, and processing data. The goal of his research is to understand and exploit the value of data. He often uses techniques from data management, statistics, and machine learning. His main effort these days is on building platforms to support markets of data. This is part of a larger research effort on understanding the Economics of Data. He’s part of ChiData, the data systems research group at The University of Chicago.

Homepage.

Michael J. Franklin is the inaugural holder of the Liew Family Chair of Computer Science. An authority on databases, data analytics, data management and distributed systems, he also serves as senior advisor to the provost on computation and data science.

Previously, Franklin was the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and chair of the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he co-founded Berkeley’s Algorithms, Machines and People Laboratory (AMPLab), a leading academic big data analytics research center. The AMPLab won a National Science Foundation CISE “Expeditions in Computing” award, which was announced as part of the White House Big Data Research initiative in March 2012, and received support from over 30 industrial sponsors. AMPLab created industry-changing open source Big Data software including Apache Spark and BDAS, the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack. At Berkeley, he also served as an executive committee member for the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, a campus-wide initiative to advance data science environments.

An energetic entrepreneur in addition to his academic work, Franklin founded and became chief technology officer of Truviso, a data analytics company acquired by Cisco Systems. He serves on the technical advisory boards of various data-driven technology companies and organizations.

Franklin is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a two-time recipient of the ACM SIGMOD (Special Interest Group on Management of Data) “Test of Time” award. His many other honors include the outstanding advisor award from Berkeley’s Computer Science Graduate Student Association. He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1993, a Master of Software Engineering from the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies in 1986, and the B.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts in 1983.

Homepage