Anu Bradford is a legal scholar of comparative and international regulation, best known for the "Brussels Effect" framework describing how European Union regulation becomes a de facto global standard. She is the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School and director of its European Legal Studies Center.
Background and roles
Bradford holds the Henry L. Moses Professorship of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School and directs the European Legal Studies Center. Her work centers on comparative competition law, EU regulatory power, and the extraterritorial reach of regulation. Earlier scholarship includes a chapter on extraterritoriality in The Oxford Handbook of International Antitrust Economics (2015) and research on comparative competition law and EU regulatory power.
The Brussels Effect
Bradford introduced the concept of the Brussels Effect in a 2012 article in the Northwestern University Law Review and elaborated it in The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020, Oxford University Press). The framework sets out five conditions under which EU regulation becomes a global de facto standard: market size, regulatory capacity, stringent rules, inelastic targets, and non-divisibility of compliance. GDPR and the EU AI Act serve as the contemporary test cases for the mechanism.
Digital Empires
In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (2023), Bradford offers a book-length treatment of three competing regulatory models: an American market-driven model (light-touch federal regulation with litigation-based enforcement), a European rights-driven model operating through the Brussels Effect mechanism, and a Chinese state-driven model (the Digital Silk Road and a state-centric approach). The book functions as a theoretical anchor for EU-US-China regulatory comparison and is referenced across many policy-analysis sources.
Positions
Bradford's account of EU regulatory export is more descriptive than normative: it explains how the export works without taking a strong position on whether it should be emulated. That descriptive stance is one reason the framework has been adopted across ideological lines.
Relation to AI policy
Bradford's framework recurs across analysis of EU AI regulation. The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) is treated as a paradigmatic Brussels Effect test case. The EU AI Office — Enforcement Framework + GPAI Provider Guidelines illustrate an enforcement posture that reveals the limits of the Brussels Effect in AI specifically, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (Final Version, 2025) is read as a voluntary-regulation export mechanism. Techno-Federalism: How Regulatory Fragmentation Shapes the U.S.-China AI Race specializes Bradford's framework for AI, building on it (Wu), while Incentives or Obligations? The U.S. Regulatory Approach to Voluntary AI Governance Standards presents a US voluntary-standards alternative and China and the US Are Running Different AI Races supplies the China-model contrast.
Relationships
- supports: Digital Empires — Anu Bradford (2023) — her book.
- supports: Brussels Effect — concept she named.
- related: Techno-Federalism: How Regulatory Fragmentation Shapes the U.S.-China AI Race — Wu builds on her framework.
- related: EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) / EU AI Office — Enforcement Framework + GPAI Provider Guidelines / EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (Final Version, 2025) — current test cases.
- related: The Digitalist Papers (Stanford, Volumes 1–2) — essays reference her frame.