Florence G'sell is a legal scholar of AI governance and comparative law. She is a Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School and director of the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is also a tenured Professor of Private Law at Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas (on leave at Stanford), a position that places her work across both French/EU and US academic AI-governance discourse.
Background
G'sell holds a tenured chair in Private Law at Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, from which she is on leave while at Stanford. At Stanford she serves as a Visiting Professor at the Law School and directs the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. The program is funded by the Project Liberty Institute, and its work focuses on comparative law and policy for AI, deepfakes and synthetic media, platform governance, and emerging digital technologies.
Work
G'sell is the lead author of Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (Stanford Cyber Policy Center, December 2024), a 470-page comparative survey of global generative-AI regulation that serves as a reference snapshot of the comparative landscape at the end of 2024.
The 2024 report originated in the Spring 2023 Stanford Law practicum on Governance and Regulation of Emerging Technologies that G'sell taught, reflecting the program's practice of developing teaching material into published work.
Positions and statements
The report is descriptive rather than advocating, but 3 framings recur in it. The first is that regulating under uncertainty is unavoidable: governments cannot wait for complete information, and the report argues the cost of delay may be existential (see Regulating Under Uncertainty). The second is a 3-mode regulatory typology running from self-regulation through co-regulation to traditional government regulation, offered as an analytical frame in which all 3 modes coexist in most jurisdictions, with different modes dominant in each (see Regulatory Typology: Self-Regulation, Co-Regulation, Traditional Government Regulation). The third is that the EU AI Act sets out the fundamental regulatory choices, which is why the report devotes substantial space to analyzing it and reads other jurisdictions' choices against the EU framework.
G'sell is described as generally sympathetic to binding frameworks and to risk-based regulation; the report emphasizes that even comparatively hands-off jurisdictions such as the United States cannot avoid some regulatory action. This places her closer to the Bradford/EU end of the spectrum described in Digital Empires than to the market-driven or user-sovereignty camps (compare Volokh in The Digitalist Papers).
Relationships
- authored: Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell, 2024) — 470-page Dec-2024 global regulatory survey
- directs: Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies at Stanford Cyber Policy Center
- funded-by: Project Liberty Institute (program funding; not personal)
- related: Nate Persily (Stanford Law colleague; Persily's Digitalist Papers co-edit overlaps with G'sell's work); Rishi Bommasani (Stanford CRFM; reviewer on G'sell's report); Anu Bradford (Digital Empires provides the theoretical scaffolding for G'sell's 3-mode typology)
See also
- Stanford Cyber Policy Center — home institution
- Project Liberty Institute — funding source
- Regulatory Typology: Self-Regulation, Co-Regulation, Traditional Government Regulation — the analytical frame used in the report