I am an assistant professor at Boston College Law School. I teach and write on privacy law, evidence, and technology from a sociolegal perspective.
My research examines how organizations mediate the relationship between law and information—collecting, processing, and producing evidence and knowledge on which legal institutions depend. I have written on how platform actors respond to search warrants for evidence and how they navigate the legitimacy tensions that arise from that work. I also study how legal institutions use and defer to organizationally produced evidence.
I have Ph.D. and J.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and an A.B. from Harvard College. I have also served as an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission and a law clerk to Judge Deborah L. Cook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Judge Nancy F. Atlas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Frontline Enforcement in the Age of Information, 50 Law & Soc. Inquiry 312 (2025)
Internet Technology Companies as Evidence Intermediaries, 110 Va. L. Rev. 1227 (2024)
Featured on Excited Utterance Podcast, Oct. 6, 2025
Reviewed in Journal of Things We Like (Lots) (JOTWELL), Aug. 1, 2025
A previous version of this paper received the Reidenberg-Kerr Award for Outstanding Scholarship by a Junior Scholar at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference, 2022
The Death of the Privacy Policy? Effective Disclosures after In re Sears, Note, 25 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 671 (2010)
Co-authored
Disputed and Disfavored: Pain, Mental Illness, and Invisible Conditions in Disability Discrimination Cases, 371 Soc. Sci. & Med. 117885 (2025) (with Rachel Best, Catherine Fisk, Linda Hamilton Krieger, and Diana Reddy)
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. L. Soc. Sci. 97 (2020) (with Calvin Morrill, Lauren Edelman, and Rosann Greenspan)
Translated and reprinted in the Chinese journal, 20 Law and Social Science 361 (法律和社会科学), 2023
FTC Privacy and Data Security Enforcement and Guidance Under Section 5, 25:2 Competition 89 (2016) (with Alexander Reicher)
Email: yan.fang@bc.edu