Salomé Viljoen is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. She studies the information economy, particularly data about people and the automated systems that are trained on such data. She is interested in how information law structures inequality and how alternative legal arrangements might address that inequality.

Viljoen’s current work is on the political economy of social data. She is interested in the legal theories of social data: what legal status social data enjoys, what legal interest it implicates, and how the law does (and should) regulate its creation and use. She also works on algorithmic governance, particularly the use of economic optimization methods in digital settings. Viljoen primarily undertakes this work in technical and socio-technical venues, bringing legal insights into conversations over AI ethics, algorithmic fairness, and machine learning.

Her academic work has appeared in legal venues like the Yale Law Journal and the University of Chicago Law Review Online, as well as in technical venues such as the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. She also writes essays and articles for publications such as Nature, the Guardian, Logic Magazine, and Phenomenal World.