Ifeoma Ajunwa

Areas of Expertise

Law and Technology, AI and Ethics, Privacy Law, Business Law, Anti-Discrimination, Race and Law, Employment and Labor Law, Law and Health, Law and Literature, Law and Film

Biography

Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D., is an award-winning tenured law professor and author of the highly acclaimed book, The Quantified Worker, published by Cambridge University Press. At Emory, she is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law and founding director of the AI and the Future of Work Program at Emory Law. She is also the Associate Dean for Projects and Partnerships and Founding Director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University School of Law. Ajunwa was recruited from the University of North Carolina School of Law where she was a tenured law professor and the founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. Ajunwa is currently a Senior Correspondence Fellow at Center for the Study of Private Law at Yale School and Affiliate fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She has been a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017. She was a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Ajunwa’s research interests focus on global A.I. law and regulation, A.I. and discrimination issues, Privacy Law, Business Law, Health Law, Labor Law, Law and Film, etc.

Ajunwa has published dozens of law review and peer review articles. Her publications in flagship law review journals include the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, the Georgetown Law Review, Fordham Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, as well as top law journals for specialty areas including the top journal in law and technology (the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology), anti-discrimination law (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review), and employment and labor law (Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law). Her peer review publications have been in the American Journal of Law and Equality, Organizational Theory, Research in the Sociology of Work, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Society, Big Data and Society. Along with Jeremias Adams-Prassl of Oxford University Law School, she has a second book, The Oxford Handbook on Algorithmic Governance and the Law, forthcoming in 2025.

Ajunwa is an engaged public intellectual with an extensive list of bylines. She was a columnist at Forbes and has published op-eds in the New York Times, Nature, Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Slate and The Atlantic, among others. She is also a contributor to Jotwell and the Law and Political Economy (LPE) blog. Her research and legal commentary have been featured by media outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR), the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Guardian, and BBC. She has testified before Congress (the US House Committee on Education and Labor), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and has also spoken before the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Professor Ajunwa is a Founding Board Member of the Labor Tech Research Network which is an international group of scholars committed to the research of the ethics of AI used in the workplace and for labor. She is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences and has consulted or served as advisory board member for Fortune 500 tech companies.

Most recently, Ajunwa founded the Global AI and Law Colloquium which brought together AI Scholars from several continents including: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America: https://aiandthefutureofwork.org/the-inaugural-emory-global-ai-and-law-colloquium.

Books:

• The Quantified Worker: Technology in the Modern Workplace

• "A.I. and Captured Capital," Yale Law Journal Forum (forthcoming 2025).
• "Artificial Intelligence, Afrofuturism, and Economic Justice," 112 Geo L. J. 1267 (2024).
• "Automated Governance," 101 N.C.L.Rev 355 (2023).
• "Automated Video Interviewing as the New Phrenology," 36 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1173 (2022).
• "The Auditing Imperative for Automated Hiring," 34 Harv. J.L. & Tech. 621 (2021).
• "The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention," 41 Cardozo. L. Rev. 1671 (2020).
• "Age Discrimination by Platforms," 40 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L.1 (2019)
• "Algorithms at Work: Productivity Monitoring Applications and Wearable Technology," 63 St. Louis U. L.J. 21 (2019).
• "Platforms at Work: Automated Hiring Platforms and Other New Intermediaries in the Organization of the Workplace" (with Daniel Greene).

Op-eds:

• "Tech Firms Need Black AI Scholars and Labor Rights," Nature, February 12, 2021.
• "How COVID-19 Could Enable the Inclusion of Women," Ms. Magazine, November 20, 2020.
• "The Answer to a Covid-19 Vaccine May Lie In Our Genes, but We Shouldn’t Risk our Genetic Privacy to Get it," Scientific America, May 13, 2020.
• '"Beware of Automated Hiring," NY Times, October 8, 2019.
• "The Rise of Platform Authoritarianism, ACLU Blog, April 10, 2018.
• "Corporate Surveillance is Turning Human Workers into Fungible Cogs," The Atlantic, May 19, 2017.
• "Workplace Wellness Programs Could be Putting Your Health Data at Risk," The Harvard Business Review, January 19, 2017.