Information technology—computational science, software engineering, artificial intelligence, and so on—presents a large suite of interesting and difficult ethical, legal, and social challenges. IDSC, in conjunction with UM’s Ethics Programs and Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, has an opportunity to not only establish UM leadership in data science but also to demonstrate global leadership in identifying, addressing, and resolving these challenges.
Collaborations have fledged across-the-curriculum contributions to teaching and learning, including innovations in incorporating data ethics into UM’s Responsible Conduct of Research training. These relationships have stimulated research and scholarship in topics ranging from appropriate uses and users of intelligent machines, to privacy challenges raised by data collection and analysis, surveillance, and secondary use. UM has contributed to several national and international efforts to develop guidance on, and improve public understanding of, AI/Machine Learning systems.
Data Ethics and Society will be the first program of its kind to both magnify IDSC’s influence and signal UM’s commitment to integrate ethical, legal, and social issues into its most innovative scientific and pedagogic initiatives.
Andres Sawicki, JD
Professor of Law
Director, Business of Innovation, Law, & Technology Concentration
Director, Data Ethics + Society, Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing
University of Miami School of Law
Andres Sawicki is a Professor of Law and Director of the Business of Innovation, Law, and Technology Concentration (BILT) and teaches in the area of intellectual property. His primary research projects explore the extent to which IP can help solve problems in the production of inventions and expressive works. He is particularly interested in the complex psychology of creativity, and in the difficulty of coordinating multiple creative collaborators. Professor Sawicki’s research also examines the interaction among distinct patent doctrines. His work has been published by leading journals, including Cornell Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, and The University of Chicago Law Review, among others.
Professor Sawicki graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with S.B. degrees in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Science, Technology, & Society. He then earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 2006, where he was an Articles Editor for the Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.
After graduation, he clerked for the Honorable Robert D. Sack of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 2007 through 2010, he worked as an associate in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. His practice focused on intellectual property litigation, especially Hatch-Waxman Act pharmaceutical patent cases. Prior to his appointment at Miami Law, Professor Sawicki was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Thomas Elias Kadri, JD
Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
IDSC Senior Fellow, Data Ethics and Society
Thomas Kadri is a scholar and teacher of law and technology. His research examines how governments and technology companies regulate digital life, with a particular focus on privacy, sexuality, speech, and abuse. He teaches Criminal Law, Cybercrime, Torts, and a seminar on digital harms.
Professor Kadri’s scholarship has appeared in the California Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Harvard Law Review Forum, Texas Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, as well as the peer-reviewed Journal of Tort Law and Journal of Free Speech Law. His essays and commentary have also appeared in The New York Times and Slate. He is the author of three free, open-access books—Tort Law: Cases & Critique, Cybercrime Scenarios, and Dilemmas in Digital Abuse. He has served as principal investigator on a $750,000 National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary project exploring how artificial intelligence can reveal and constrain digital searches by police. In 2025, he received the Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.
Professor Kadri is a professor of law at the University of Miami and a senior fellow at the Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing. He previously taught at the University of Georgia School of Law and remains an associate with UGA’s Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies. He has also been a visiting fellow at the European University Institute and a visiting scholar at Insper São Paulo. He serves as Legislative & Policy Director at Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse, where he advises lawmakers and technology companies on tech-enabled abuse and has provided expert testimony before committees in the U.S. Congress and the Massachusetts Legislature. Earlier in his career, while in law school, he worked with the Federal Public Defender in Ohio and assisted the legal team in the landmark Supreme Court case recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. He then clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Raised in a Lebanese-British family, Professor Kadri spent much of his childhood in England and France. He earned a degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews before moving to the United States as a Bobby Jones Scholar at Emory University. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he was awarded the Henry M. Bates Award, the school’s highest graduation honor. He then earned his Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School as a Mellon Fellow.