I study how legal rules, contracts, and governance practices evolve in response to legal reform, institutional design, and technological change. Combining empirical research, doctrinal analysis, and computational tools, I explore how law is shaped by—and shapes—the institutional contexts in which firms, regulators, and courts operate.

My work treats legal text as data, analyzing charters, privacy policies, judicial opinions, and other legally operative texts at scale. By building new datasets and applying tools from economics, statistics, and machine learning, I uncover patterns in corporate governance and regulatory behavior that were previously inaccessible to empirical study.

I also examine the responsible integration of AI and quantitative methods into legal scholarship, exploring where these tools deepen our understanding of law, where they introduce challenges, and how their adoption can be structured to support accountability, transparency, and institutional rigor.

 

My writing has appeared in leading academic journals, among them the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Journal on Regulation.

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My teaching interests are in business law and at the intersection of law and technology. Together with Holger Spamann, I am the co-author of a Corporations casebook.

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Further information about my work is available on my Google Scholar Page and my SSRN Author Page.

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If you have any questions, please get in touch. My email address is fjens@wustl.edu.