Gus Hurwitz on Technology and the Law

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service. Recently I caught up with Gus Hurwitz, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and the director of the Governance and Technology Center. He’s also the Director of Law and Economics Programs at the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland based think tank that focuses on antitrust law and economics policy issues. Gus told me he’s leaving Nebraska at the end of the semester for a new position that is soon to be announced.  Our conversation covered a range of topics, from how to think about the relationship between technology and the law, how to get engineers to engage with ethical and legal concepts, the view of the coastal tech policy discourse from Gus’s vantage in the middle of the country, the role and politics of the Federal Trade Commission, and why Gus finds some inspiration in Frank Herbert’s Dune. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion. Justin Hendrix: I wanted to start big picture. What do you see as your intellectual project, as your area of research? Gus Hurwitz: That’s a great question. I think I can answer it a couple of ways. The immediate way they’d answer is it is changing and in flux. This is something that we drill into academics the opposite way. Academics, young academics, you need to have your methodology and your research agenda, and you have to develop your identity around those and have a…Gus Hurwitz on Technology and the Law