Ellen Goodman

Professor Goodman specializes in information policy law. Her research interests include smart cities, algorithmic governance, freedom of expression, platform policies, communications architectures, media and advertising law, and transparency policy. She is Co-Director and co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL). She blogs at riipl.rutgers.edu and at medium.com, and has written for the The Guardian, Protego Press, Democracy, and Slate.

Professor Goodman is currently a Senior Fellow at the Digital Innovation & Democracy Institute at the German Marshall Fund and a Knight Foundation grantee, working on new models of platform regulation and transparency, and advises a number of cities on responsible tech deployment. She is a Pratt Fund grantee, collaborating on a public database on government use of predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence. She has been a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grantee, conducting research on new legal challenges facing digital journalists, a Democracy Fund grantee working on platform policy, and a Ford Foundation grantee working on new models of public service media. She served as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the FCC and helped in the production of a pathbreaking report on the Information Needs of Communities. Goodman has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication and the Wharton School, as well as the London School of Economics. Professor Goodman has served as an expert before the National Academies of Science and Technology, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Brookings Institution, and the Aspen Institute.

Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2003, Professor Goodman was a partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling LLP and served as Of Counsel with the firm until 2009. Professor Goodman clerked for Judge Norma L. Shapiro on the U.S. Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, after graduating from Harvard Law School and Harvard College. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children.