Congress has spent most of 2026 fighting over AI regulation without passing much. Some of the real intellectual groundwork is happening two hours south, on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus.
A new feature in the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) Magazine spotlights three Miami Law professors. Their work is building the legal frameworks that will decide how AI gets regulated once lawmakers catch up.
The Professor Directing Miami’s Data Ethics Program
Andres Sawicki directs the Data Ethics and Society program at UM’s Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing. His work sits at the center of the debate over how AI should be regulated, not just whether it should be.
That distinction matters. Most of Washington’s 2026 AI fights have stalled on whether to regulate at all. Sawicki’s research skips past that fight to the harder question. What specific rules would actually work.
Two More Angles on the Same Problem
Thomas Kadri studies online privacy and how governments use AI themselves. That question gets sharper every time a federal agency adopts a new AI tool. Yonathan Arbel researches AI-related corporate governance and existential risk.
Together, the three professors cover AI regulation from three different angles. Individual privacy. Government power. Corporate accountability.
Why a Law School Matters Here
Miami doesn’t have Washington’s regulatory apparatus or Silicon Valley’s engineering base. What it has is a research university willing to treat AI governance as a legal discipline, not a talking point.
That’s a genuine niche. Most AI policy debate happens in press releases and congressional hearings. Actual legal scholarship happens somewhere quieter. It’s also the kind of work that shapes how courts and regulators eventually act.
UM Law is building on that work. The school plans to launch a new Law and AI colloquium this spring. That gives the three professors’ research a permanent home, instead of scattering it across individual papers.
What Comes Next
The colloquium’s timing isn’t incidental. By spring, the first wave of AI lawsuits, workplace disputes and data center zoning fights will have generated real case law. Scholars will have facts to study, not just hypotheticals.
Sawicki, Kadri and Arbel will have a home base to turn that case law into frameworks regulators and judges actually use. For a school that has never marketed itself as a tech hub, that’s a quiet kind of leverage.
Miami Law isn’t lobbying Congress. It’s writing the footnotes future regulation will cite.