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Alan Z. Rozenshtein

medium confidence · updated 2026-07-26

University of Minnesota Law School professor; Lawfare Research Director and Senior Editor; works on national-security law, cybersecurity, executive power, and AI policy. Co-author of Dominating AI Requires Understanding AI (Lawfare, May 2026).

Contents

Alan Z. Rozenshtein is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and the Research Director and a Senior Editor at Lawfare (Lawfare). His work covers national-security law, cybersecurity, executive power, and emerging-technology governance.

Background and roles

Rozenshtein joined the University of Minnesota Law School as a visiting professor in 2017, became an associate professor of law in 2019, and earned tenure in 2024 (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was a Heyman Fellow, served as articles editor of the Harvard Law Review, and contributed to Lawfare (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). After law school he clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein).

From October 2014 to April 2017 he served as an Attorney Advisor in the Office of Law and Policy in the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where his work focused on operational, legal, and policy issues relating to cybersecurity and foreign intelligence (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). From October 2016 to April 2017 he also served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Maryland, and during this period he taught cybersecurity at Georgetown Law (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). Before joining the Justice Department he was an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and he has been a visiting faculty fellow at the University of Nebraska College of Law (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein).

In addition to his faculty position and his role at Lawfare, Rozenshtein is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI (LawAI), a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network (Source: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/contributors/arozenshtein) (Source: https://law-ai.org/team/alan-rozenshtein/). In November 2024 he was appointed Lawfare's research director to lead a research initiative formalizing the publication's long-form output (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). At the University of Minnesota his teaching includes constitutional law, criminal procedure, legislation and regulation, a Law and Technology Workshop, and a course on Artificial Intelligence and the Law (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). His listed areas of expertise are constitutional law, national security, and technology law (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein).

Scholarship

Rozenshtein's academic writing spans surveillance law, content moderation and the First Amendment, executive power, and AI governance.

His 2018 article Surveillance Intermediaries, published in the Stanford Law Review, argues that large technology companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook act as intermediaries that constrain government surveillance, and it offers a taxonomy of the legal, economic, and political mechanisms through which they do so (Surveillance Intermediaries (Rozenshtein, Stanford Law Review, 2018)). The three techniques it identifies are "proceduralism and litigiousness that reject voluntary cooperation in favor of minimal compliance and aggressive litigation"; "technological unilateralism, in which companies design products and services to make surveillance harder"; and "policy mobilization that rallies legislative and public opinion." Intermediaries also strengthen what the article calls the surveillance separation of powers, making the surveillance executive "more subject to interbranch constraints from Congress and the courts and to intrabranch constraints from economic and foreign relations agencies as well as from the surveillance executive's own surveillance-limiting components."

The article's normative conclusion is two-sided, and turns on which technique is used: intermediaries "enhance surveillance self-government… when they mobilize public opinion and strengthen the surveillance separation of powers," but "undermine it when their unilateral technological changes prevent the government from exercising its lawful surveillance authorities" (Surveillance Intermediaries (Rozenshtein, Stanford Law Review, 2018)). His later scholarship includes The Virtuous Executive, 108 Minnesota Law Review 605 (2023), and, with Jed Handelsman Shugerman, January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, and the Overt-Acts Rule, 37 Constitutional Commentary 275 (2022) (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). On platform regulation he has written Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media, 3 Journal of Free Speech Law 217 (2023); Interpreting the Ambiguities of Section 230, 41 Yale Journal on Regulation Bulletin 60 (2024); and, with Kyle Langvardt, Beyond the Editorial Analogy: First Amendment Protections for Platform Content Moderation, 6 Journal of Free Speech Law 1 (2025) (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein).

His AI-focused work includes Unbundling AI Openness, 2026 Wisconsin Law Review 171, written with Parth Nobel and Chinmayi Sharma (Source: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein). According to LawAI, his current research focuses on open-source AI, First Amendment limits on AI regulation, and the interaction between AI and executive power (Source: https://law-ai.org/team/alan-rozenshtein/). Through LawAI he has published Mapping AI Policy: Where, Why, and How to Intervene (March 2026), with Justin Curl, and the blog post The Unitary Artificial Executive (November 2025) (Source: https://law-ai.org/team/alan-rozenshtein/).

Writing and positions

Rozenshtein's scholarship and Lawfare coverage address cybersecurity, executive power, AI policy, executive-branch leverage, and Defense Production Act (Defense Production Act (DPA)) invocations.

He co-authored, with Kevin Frazier, Dominating AI Requires Understanding AI (Lawfare, May 12 2026), summarized at Dominating AI Requires Understanding AI (Frazier + Rozenshtein, Lawfare, May 12 2026) and discussed at Dominance by Understanding (Frazier-Rozenshtein policy frame). The essay's analysis of executive-branch leverage draws on national-security-law tools including DPA Section 705/708, restoration of the CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — regulator role) workforce, and the Cyber Response and Recovery Fund.

Relationships

Sources

  • Dominating AI Requires Understanding AI (Frazier + Rozenshtein, Lawfare, May 12 2026)
  • University of Minnesota Law School faculty profile — https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein
  • Lawfare contributor page — https://www.lawfaremedia.org/contributors/arozenshtein
  • Institute for Law & AI team page — https://law-ai.org/team/alan-rozenshtein/
  • Surveillance Intermediaries, 70 Stanford Law Review 99 (2018) — https://review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/01/70-Stan.-L.-Rev.-99.pdf
Categories: People & Organizations | academic | opinion | government | frontier-models | national-security
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