A paper co-authored by Salomé Viljoen has won the 2023 Reidenberg-Kerr Award at the year’s Privacy Law Scholars Conference.
The conference presents the award for “overall excellence of a paper submitted by a pre-tenure scholar.” This year’s conference honored “Valuing Social Data,” co-authored by Viljoen and Amanda Parsons of the University of Colorado Law School. The paper explores “how data production creates value and how legal regimes like privacy and tax are poorly equipped to grapple with and regulate data value,” Viljoen said.
“It is really such an honor to have this work recognized. As a junior scholar just starting out, it means so much to receive this kind of affirmation from scholars whose work I admire and that influences my own. It feels like a vote of confidence that Amanda and I are on the right track with our ideas,” Viljoen said.
Viljoen, who joined the faculty last year as an assistant professor of law, studies the information economy—particularly data about people and the automated systems that are trained on such data. Her academic work has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review Online, and others. She also writes essays and articles for publications such as Nature, the Guardian, and Logic Magazine.
The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is considered the premier gathering of privacy scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the world. It supports scholarship at the intersection of law and technology.
