Dr Jennifer Cobbe
- University Associate Professor in Law and Technology
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About
I am Associate Professor in Law and Technology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, where I'm a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law and a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. I'm also a Research Affiliate of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. Before joining the Law Faculty, I was a Senior Research Associate in the Computer Science Department at Cambridge as part of the Compliant & Accountable Systems research group. I hold a PhD in Law and an LLM in Law and Governance from Queen’s University, Belfast. For my PhD, I studied the use of machine learning in commercial and state internet surveillance, and the impact of these related forms of surveillance on people and society.
Research
I'm generally interested in critical, interdisciplinary work on questions of power, political economy, and the law around internet platforms and informational capitalism, technological supply chains and infrastructures, and AI and automated decision-making. I am particularly interested in law’s constitutive role in informational capitalism, how legal frameworks (such as data protection) intersect with complex technological systems and with tech industry business models, and how law can better address these questions to more effectively regulate digital technologies in future.
For the 2026-27 academic year, I am convening the LLM paper 'Law, Technology & Society', and lecturing on the undergraduate constitutional law paper. I am open to supervising PhDs on topics related to law and the political economy of informational capitalism, particularly around cloud computing, AI and automated decision-making, data and data governance, and platform governance. Emails from prospective students wanting to work on topics related to crypto, blockchain, IP, or AI in legal practice or the legal system will be ignored.
Research centres: Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL); Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL)