Yan Fang

Doctoral Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (ABD)

I am a sociolegal researcher, lawyer, and doctoral candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. I study how legal actors and institutions adjust to changes in technology and the impact of those changes on adjudicative systems.

Using qualitative methods, I theorize the legal and organizational processes that shape legal actors’ access to and use of evidence across several bodies of law, including privacy law, evidence, civil procedure, and disabilities law.

My dissertation examines how internet technology companies shape the work of law enforcement officials responsible for gathering evidence. My future projects build on this research by developing proposals to strengthen the capacity of legal institutions to find, evaluate, and oversee evidence in a changing information environment.

I am also part of an interdisciplinary research team studying federal courts’ disposition of disability discrimination cases. In that project, I focus on comparing how judges evaluate evidence produced by organizations versus individuals.

Publications

Internet Technology Companies as Evidence Intermediaries, 110 Va. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024)

Creative Confluence: Lauren Edelman’s Collaborations, 57 Law & Soc’y Rev. 397 (2023) (with Rachel Best, Catherine Fisk, Linda Krieger, Diana Reddy, and Todd Neece)

Conversations in Law and Society: Oral Histories of the Emergence and Transformation of the Movement, 16 Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 97 (2020) (with Calvin Morrill, Lauren Edelman, and Rosann Greenspan)

FTC Privacy and Data Security Enforcement and Guidance Under Section 5, 25:2 Competition 89 (2016) (with Alexander Reicher)

The Death of the Privacy Policy? Effective Disclosures after In re Sears, Note, 25 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 671 (2010)