MARÍA P. ÁNGEL

I am a Postdoctoral Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington School of Law (advised by Ryan Calo). My principal fields of work are Privacy Law, Law & Technology, and Science & Technology Studies (STS).

I study how evolving legal and policy concepts used by scholars and policymakers—such as “privacy,” “technological design,” and “trust & safety”—shape the regulation of digital technologies. Today, debates over how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies remain conceptually unsettled. What counts as AI, what risks it entails, and how it should be governed, for example, are still up for grabs. The conceptual frames that gain traction, the metaphors we adopt, and the meanings that congeal around these technologies will have long-lasting legal and institutional consequences.

Therefore, my work foregrounds the politics of conceptualization in law and technology. In my research, I pursue three core goals: (1) to trace shifts in legal categories among scholars and policymakers, (2) to analyze how these shifts affect regulatory outcomes and legal institutions, and (3) to evaluate whether such conceptual moves are normatively appropriate, either to critique and revise them, or to build from them.

I take an interdisciplinary, socio-legal approach, combining qualitative empirical methods—such as document and media analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation—with theoretical insights from STS. This allows me to analyze how legal and policy concepts are constructed, contested, and operationalized on the ground, and to assess how they impact the efficacy of digital governance.

My work has been presented and awarded at conferences such as the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), the Internet Law Works in Progress Conference, the Michigan Annual Junior Scholars Conference, We Robot, the ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law (CSLAW), the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), the Society for the Social Studies of Science(4S)/ESOCITE, and the Internet Freedom Festival.

During my Ph.D., I worked as a research assistant at the University of Washington Tech Policy Lab. Additionally, I served as an articles editor for the Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts; was appointed as an expert member of the Washington State Automated Decision-Making Systems Workgroup; worked as a summer legal/public policy intern at New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) (mentored by Lauren Sarkesian); and interned at Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective (SMC) (mentored by danah boyd).

Prior to beginning my Ph.D., I was a researcher for the Colombian research and advocacy organization Dejusticia, in the Privacy & Access to Information area. Nowadays, I continue to be a member of Dejusticia as an associate researcher.

Besides my Ph.D. in Law from the University of Washington (and the Graduate Certificate in STS I completed while pursuing this degree), I hold a dual B.A. in Law and Political Science from Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), and a master’s degree in Administrative Law from Universidad del Rosario (Colombia). I am a Fulbright grantee, an IAPP Westin Scholar Award recipient, and a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest.

This website provides an overview of my work. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more!

What’s been going on lately

• As of August 2025, I am actively on the academic job market!
• I was featured in the alumni newsletter of the University of Washington School of Law (and included in the UW Law homepage as their hero story).
• I was included by Women in AI Ethics as one of the eight “Rising Stars in AI Ethics” for 2024.
• I was selected by The OpEd Project (in partnership with The MacArthur Foundation) as a 2023 Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest.
• I received the Reidenberg-Kerr Award for Outstanding Scholarship by a Junior Scholar at the 2023 Privacy Law Scholars Conference!