In this episode I speak with Professor Danielle Citron who is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law and Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School, where she writes and teaches about privacy, free expression, and civil rights. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2019 for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy. She also serves as the inaugural director of the school’s LawTech Center.

She is a gifted teacher and prolific writer including two books Hate Crimes in Cyberspace and the forthcoming The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age (available for pre-order here) and more than 50 law review articles. More than that, she is a public intellectual who has published in popular outlets, given testimony to lawmakers, and has worked directly with legislators on issues related to technology and privacy. 

Before joining UVA Law, Professor Citron taught at the Boston University School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law where she progressed from Visiting Assistant Professor to a named professorship with the rank of tenure. She started her legal career as a litigation associate at Wilkie Farr in New York and served as a law clerk to United States District Court Judge Mary Johnson Lowe. She is a graduate of Duke University and Fordham Law.

In our conversation we discussed her largely unplanned path to legal academia in a field that did not even really exist when she graduated law school, how disappointment and being told no is an important part of growing as a junior lawyer, ways to become a part of a scholarly community even as a law student or junior lawyer, her writing process and how she crafts scholarship that speaks to academic and more general audiences, the fast-growing area of technology and data privacy (and the jobs that are being created as a result), and the importance of being a life-long student as a lawyer.

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