Biography
Karen Yeung (D.Phil (Oxon), BCL (Oxon), LL.B (Hons) B.Comm), is currently Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow in Law, Ethics and Informatics based at Birmingham Law School and School of Computer Science. She received her LL.B (Hons) and B.Comm from the University of Melbourne, Australia and her BCL and D Phil from Oxford University.
She has held previous academic appointments as Chair in Law at King’s College London where she was also Director of the Centre for Technology, Ethics, Law and Society and prior to that as a University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in Law at St Anne’s College, Oxford where she began her academic career.
Karen Yeung has been at the forefront of deepening our understanding of the challenges associated with the regulation and governance of emerging technologies. She is one of the pioneering scholars who laid the groundwork for the emerging field of ‘Law and Technology’ studies as a sub-discipline of legal scholarship.
She has spent the last 10 years of her almost 30-year academic career examining the legal, ethical and democratic implications of the digital transformation sweeping across contemporary societies. She is recognised worldwide as a leading scholar in the governance of AI, with her ongoing work highlighting how AI systems can undermine the social conditions necessary for democratic governance, human rights and the rule of law.
Karen Yeung has been extensively involved in many technology policy initiatives at the European and international level. As a former member of the EU’s High Level Expert Group on AI, she has championed the role and rule of law in the governance of AI. She served as Rapporteur for the Council of Europe’s Expert Committee on the human rights dimensions of automated data processing and different forms of artificial intelligence (MSI AUT) (2018-2020) which developed and drafted the Committee of Ministers’ recommendations and policy declarations on the human rights impacts of AI and the manipulative impact of algorithmic processes.
Within the UK, she is Special Advisor to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, to support its inquiry into AI regulation and human rights and a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Steering Group on Technology Pathways and Meaningful Innovation and expert advisor to the Digital Regulators Cooperation Forum (DRCF), having previously served as a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of UKRI’s Trustworthy Autonomous Systems programme (2020-2025), the Royal Society and British Academy Working Group on Data Governance, ethics and expert advisor to the
Topol Independent Technology Review for the NHS (2018-2019), and Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on Genome Editing and Human Reproduction (2016-2018).
Within the UK, she is Special Advisor to the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, to support its inquiry into AI regulation and human rights and is a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of UKRI’s Trustworthy Autonomous Systems programme, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Steering Group on Technology Pathways and Meaningful Innovation and expert advisor to the Digital Regulators Cooperation Forum (DRCF), having previously served as a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of UKRI’s Trustworthy Autonomous Systems programme (2020-2025), the Royal Society and British Academy Working Group on Data Governance, ethics and expert advisor to the
Topol Independent Technology Review for the NHS (2018-2019), and Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on Genome Editing and Human Reproduction (2016-2018).
Karen Yeung’s most recent book, An Introduction to Law and Regulation, 2nd edition (with Sofia Ranchordas) is out now and available via all major book sellers . Her other recent books include Algorithmic Regulation (co-edited with Martin Lodge) Oxford University Press (2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology (co-edited with Roger Brownsword and Eloise Scotford) in 2017.
She serves on the editorial boards of several leading peer-reviewed academic journals, including Big Data & Society, Data & Policy, Public Law, Technology and Regulation and the Journal of Cross disciplinary Research in Computational Law.