LAWYER / RESEARCHER / WRITER
I am Abdulrahman Akinyemi, a lawyer, researcher, and LL.M. candidate in Law and Technology at the University of Ottawa.
Much of my work begins with a fairly simple question: what happens when the rules we have encounter technologies they were never really designed for?
I research and write about artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, privacy and data governance, consumer protection, digital platforms, and the relationship between technological design and legal regulation.
RESEARCH
Technology has a habit of turning familiar legal ideas into difficult questions.
What does fairness mean when an algorithm helps decide who gets a job? What happens to consent when data collected for one purpose becomes useful for another? And how should law respond when platforms and automated systems begin making choices that were once made by people?
My research currently follows those questions across three broad areas.
I am interested in the decisions we increasingly allow machines to participate in — who gets seen, selected, assessed, served, or excluded — and what that means for fairness, equality, accountability, and institutional responsibility.
Data rarely stays where it began.
My work examines what happens as personal information moves between purposes, institutions, technologies, and jurisdictions — and whether ideas such as consent, transparency and purpose limitation can keep up.
Some of the most important rules governing technological life are not written in legislation.
They are built into platforms, interfaces, defaults, algorithms, and technical systems. I am interested in how those choices distribute power — and what happens when they collide with the values law is supposed to protect.
SELECTED WRITING
I write in different forms: research papers when a problem needs room, policy analysis when the architecture matters, case analysis when courts and regulators give us something worth unpacking, and shorter commentary when something happening in technology simply makes me stop and ask, wait, what does the law actually say about this?
EXPLORE ALL RESEARCH & WRITING ↗What happens to consumer protection when advertisements, endorsements, reviews, images, and other commercial representations can increasingly be manufactured by machines?
When information collected for one purpose later becomes valuable for research, when does legitimate secondary use become something else entirely?
A regulatory enforcement story that raises a much larger question about how seriously platforms must now take the governance of children's data.
ABOUT
I started my legal career in Nigeria, working across litigation, corporate and regulatory advisory, data protection, consumer protection, and emerging technology.
Over time, I became increasingly interested in a different kind of legal problem: not simply what the law says, but what happens when legal rules encounter technologies, institutions, markets, and people in the real world.
That curiosity eventually brought me to Ottawa and to an LL.M. in Law and Technology.
The longer story is here.
ABOUT ME ↗CONTACT
Research, technology, law, a project, an argument I have made, an argument you think I have gotten completely wrong — I am always open to an interesting conversation.