Peter Ormerod

Associate Professor of Law

Biography

Peter Ormerod studies the businesses built on information and the extent to which law governs them. His scholarship examines how firms turn data about people and about the work they perform into money and what legal tools are available to discipline that transformation. 

His current projects ask who will capture the value that artificial intelligence extracts from human work, why the Supreme Court has recently declined industry’s invitations to wield the First Amendment as a tool of deregulation, and when the outputs of large language models are expressive. 

His recent works focused on the legal regimes that govern how companies personalize their products, services, and prices; argued that states retain considerable discretion to regulate platforms’ design and engineering decisions; showed how the current Court has proven unexpectedly receptive to laws burdening profit-motivated information processing; explained how new privacy laws entrench dominant platforms; and mined the frictions in the relationship between competition policy and structural data governance.

An earlier line of work addressed privacy law’s enforcement mechanisms and the legal obstacles that frustrate them. Those works proposed a state-law strict-liability remedy for data misuse; asked what privacy theory could do for standing doctrine; and argued that qui tam actions are a useful hybrid between public and private enforcement. His earliest scholarship concerned cybersecurity and the Fourth Amendment, evaluating what corporate-governance law meant for cybersecurity incidents; surveying the legal difficulties raised by Stuxnet, ransomware, and the internet of things; and documenting the third-party doctrine’s collision with digital technologies on the eve of Carpenter v. United States.

Ormerod teaches Torts, Information Privacy Law, and a seminar on Artificial Intelligence & the Law, and he has previously taught Internet Law and Business Associations. His recent service has involved the question of what artificial intelligence means for higher education. 

Before joining Villanova, Ormerod was an assistant professor of law at Northern Illinois University College of Law and an assistant professor of business law at Western Carolina University. Before entering academia, he worked in the Public Policy & Regulation Group of Holland & Knight’s Washington, DC, office and served as a judicial intern to Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. He earned his JD from The George Washington University Law School and his BA in economics, magna cum laude, from The George Washington University. 

Practice Experience

• Law Clerk and Staff Attorney, Holland & Knight, LLP
• Judicial Intern, United States District Court for the District of Columbia

Recent Publications

Office: Rm 244, John F. Scarpa Hall
Phone: 610-519-6838

Courses and Seminars

• Torts
• Information Privacy Law
• Artificial Intelligence & the Law Seminar 

Education

• The George Washington University Law School, Juris Doctor
• The George Washington University, Bachelor of Arts