Neil Richards holds the Koch Distinguished Professorship at Washington University School of Law, where he co-directs the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law. He is also a Visiting Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, an affiliate scholar with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and the Yale Information Society Project, and a consultant and expert in privacy cases. Professor Richards serves on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum and is a member of the American Law Institute. He writes, teaches, and lectures about the regulation of the technologies powered by human information that are revolutionizing our society. He is the author of Why Privacy Matters (Oxford Press 2022) and Intellectual Privacy (Oxford Press 2015). His award-winning writings on privacy and civil liberties have appeared in a wide variety of media, from the Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal to The Guardian, WIRED, and Slate.
Professor Richards received his B.A. summa cum laude with special honors from George Washington University in 1994, and his J.D. and M.A. (History) from the University of Virginia in 1997, where he was awarded numerous academic prizes. He clerked for Paul Niemeyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the United States. Before becoming an academic, he practiced privacy law and appellate litigation at what is now WilmerHale in Washington, D.C.