Information Law - The Cordell Institute

Technology is disrupting our existing legal and ethical frameworks

Technologists might praise “disruptive innovation,” but disruption isn’t always a good thing. Digital technologies exploiting human information continue to transform our society in many positive ways, but they have also disrupted important legal, ethical and policy frameworks designed to protect human beings and the values they care about. We need to make sure that human values, including our hard-won commitments to civil liberties and civil rights, survive the digital transformation.

Our work seeks a middle path

We are excited by the tremendous promise of digital technologies, in health and elsewhere, to create a better world and to encourage human flourishing.

Our mission at the Cordell Institute is to help guide the development of new technologies in positive ways – to enable us to take advantage of their undeniable benefits while also avoiding their undeniable dangers. Our goal is to drive the conversation around the legal, ethical and human implications of our human information policy, and to make sure that human values and human goals continue to drive technological development and deployment. This means embracing new tools while protecting old values like privacy and equality, free expression and due process, to ensure that the digital transformation’s promise of a better world is one that we can really trust.

“The challenges and issues facing the health care industry are among the most complicated and interesting in all of privacy law – because of the wide variety of interested stakeholders involved in any discussion of health care privacy.”

– Kirk J. Nahra, Cordell Institute Fellow