Biography
David Stein studies the interplay between legal institutions and technical infrastructures. His work uses moments of transformative innovation—such as the mass adoption of smart phones, the internet, or generative AI—as natural experiments that provide insight into the relationship between institutions and infrastructures. He joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2025.
Previously, Stein was an assistant professor of law and computer science at the Northeastern School of Law and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He also did a postdoc at NYU Law, where he was the Frank J. Guarini Scholar of Global Law and Technology, a fellow at the Information Law Institute, and taught a course on the regulation of global technologies. Stein’s research has appeared or is forthcoming at venues including Wisconsin Law Review, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Harvard Journal of Legislation, Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Santa Clara High Tech Law Journal, and the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Before entering the academy, he spent a decade in the tech industry, where his work included roles as an early software engineer at Dropbox, director of product engineering at Braze and cybersecurity lead for Sidewalk Labs—Google’s smart city initiative. He is the named inventor on seven patented digital identity and database management technologies. He holds an S.B. and M.Eng. from MIT and a J.D. from NYU Law.
Education
J.D., NYU Law
M.Eng., MIT
S.B., MIT