Thomas E. Kadri

Thomas E. Kadri is a scholar and teacher of law and technology. His research explores the relationship between digital technologies, social norms, and legal institutions, with a focus on the regulation of privacy, speech and abuse. He teaches Torts, Criminal Law, Cybercrime, and a seminar on digital harms and privacy.

Kadri’s scholarship is published or forthcoming in the California Law Review, the Harvard Law Review Forum, the Texas Law Review, the UCLA Law Review and the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, as well as the peer-reviewed Journal of Tort Law and Journal of Free Speech Law. His shorter pieces appear in The New York Times and Slate. Additionally, he serves as the principal investigator on an interdisciplinary project about digital evidence and privacy, funded by a $750,000 National Science Foundation grant, exploring AI’s potential to reveal and constrain how police and judges may obtain people’s data.

To accompany his courses, Kadri has authored three open-access books that he publishes for free online: Tort Law: Cases & Critique, Cybercrime Scenarios and Dilemmas in Digital Abuse. In 2022, he was awarded a Lilly Teaching Fellowship — the “jewel in the crown” of development and engagement for junior faculty at the University of Georgia. He also serves as chair of 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 & Technology Law Society.

Kadri is actively engaged in service work that builds on his research. As legislative & policy director at Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse, he advises legislators and companies on measures to protect survivors of abuse. For example, he has provided expert testimony before committees in the U.S. Congress and Massachusetts Legislature, as well as feedback on drafting various federal and state bills. He also serves on the board of directors for Project Safe, a nonprofit working to tackle domestic violence throughout Georgia.

Kadri joined the UGA faculty in 2020 and holds a courtesy appointment at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, as well as affiliate positions at the Institute for Women’s Studies and the Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy. He has served as a visiting fellow at the European University Institute and as a visiting scholar at Insper São Paulo. In recent years, he has pursued research in Brazil and Argentina as a MacMillan Center Fellow and presented his work in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and across the United States. Before entering academia, he clerked 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. He 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.

Raised in a Lebanese-British family, Kadri spent most of his childhood in England and France. After earning his undergraduate degree in international relations from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, he moved to the United States to attend Emory University as a Bobby Jones Scholar. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he 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. He then earned his Ph.D. in Law from Yale Law School, where he was a Mellon Fellow.