About Me

I’m an assistant professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. I hold a courtesy appointment at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and am an affiliate faculty member at the Institute for Women’s Studies and the Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy.

My research focuses on torts and criminal law, with an emphasis on how technology, law, and social norms enable and affect privacy, speech, and abuse. My scholarship appears in journals including the Harvard Law Review Forum, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, Utah Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Journal of Free Speech Law, and I‘ve published shorter pieces in The New York Times and Slate. In 2021, I received a National Science Foundation grant to fund a $750,000 project on digital evidence and privacy rights. As a principal investigator for this interdisciplinary collaboration with computer scientists, I’ll research if artificial intelligence can constrain police discretion in searching digital devices while satisfying constitutional and statutory privacy laws.

I teach Torts, Cybercrime, and a seminar on privacy and digital abuse. To accompany each course, I’ve authored open-access books that I publish for free online: Tort Law: Cases & Critique, Cybercrime Scenarios (with Samuel Won), and Dilemmas in Digital Abuse. In 2022, I was awarded a Lilly Teaching Fellowship — the “jewel in the crown” of development and engagement for junior faculty at the University of Georgia. I also serve on the executive committee for the AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems and as faculty supervisor for the Middle Eastern Law Student Association and the Privacy, Security, and Technology Law Society.

I’m actively engaged in legislative and service work that builds on my scholarship. As an affiliated researcher and Legislative & Policy Director at the Clinic to End Tech Abuse at Cornell University, I lead the organization’s advocacy efforts and advise federal and state legislators on laws to protect survivors of abuse. For example, I testified as an expert witness before the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Communications and Technology in support of the Safe Connections Act, providing feedback on the bill as it progressed through both chambers of Congress. I also serve on the board of directors for Project Safe, a nonprofit working in and around Athens to tackle domestic violence.

Before entering academia, I served as a judicial clerk for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Thomas Griesa of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. I also worked with the Federal Public Defender in Ohio and assisted the legal team behind the case that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry. I have served as an adjunct professor at New York Law School and as a visiting scholar at Insper São Paulo. In recent years, I have pursued research in Brazil and Argentina as a MacMillan Center Fellow and presented my work in Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I’m fluent in French and conversational in Portuguese and Spanish.

Raised in a Lebanese-British family, I spent most of my childhood in England and France. After earning my undergraduate degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, I moved to the United States to attend Emory University as a Bobby Jones Scholar. I received my J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, where I served as executive editor of the Michigan Law Review, was inducted into the Order of the Coif, and won the Henry M. Bates Award — the school’s highest honor. I then earned my Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School, where I was a Mellon Fellow.

If you’re interested in learning more about my work, please send me an email, read my scholarship on SSRN, or follow me on Twitter.