Hannah Bloch-Wehba

I grew up in New York City and spent a lot of my adolescence steeped in debates about the role of law in shaping our nation's response to the September 11 attacks. In college, I studied history to try to get a handle on the way that crises can affect liberty, equality, and the rule of law. I also worked as a fact-checker and toyed with the idea of writing as a career. I loved history and journalism, but I thought that studying the law would help me play a more direct role in empowering people and checking abuses.

I love getting into a flow in the classroom with students as we untangle complicated doctrines and assess competing values. I love seeing students get excited about an area of the law and helping them figure out what, exactly, it is that interests or troubles them. We all come into the classroom with distinctive perspectives informed by our own experiences. I love the moments in which we can glimpse the stakes of legal disputes through another person's eyes.

Before law school, I received a post-graduate DAAD Fellowship to study international relations in Germany, where I moonlighted as a freelance editor and translator. After law school, I worked in private practice in Houston before becoming a legal fellow at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where I primarily did law enforcement and national security work.

The legal rules governing new technologies are changing all the time. I hope my students will learn that a good lawyer doesn't only know what the rules are now - they understand the forces that are likely to lead to different rules in the future.

I love all things food-related, especially exploring grocery stores and finding new-to-me ingredients to cook and experiment with. I also enjoy making pottery and running, though I'm not particularly talented at either.

In the broadest sense, my scholarship is about the relationship between technology and democratic governance. My current research focuses on free expression, privacy, and government accountability in the context of new technologies. Technology is shaped by law, but it also informs our understanding and expectations of what law is, how it works, and what it can achieve.