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Spencer Williams

Spencer Williams

Professor of Law

Phone
(619) 525-1681
Department
Faculty
CV
SSRN

Biography

Professor Williams studies the intersection of business law and innovation. He writes on topics including AI safety, legal automation, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and complex transactions. His research draws on interdisciplinary theories including complexity theory and network science, and he employs a variety of quantitative empirical methods. He previously ran the Program on Corporate Governance and Practice at Stanford Law School. Early in his career, he practiced corporate and securities law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Silicon Valley where he represented a wide range of high-growth technology companies and investment firms. He received a JD from Stanford Law School and a BS from MIT.

  • J.D Stanford Law School
  • B.S. MIT
  • Contracts
  • Business Organizations

Law Review Publications

  • After Work: Productivity and Purpose in a Future Without Jobs (work in progress)
  • AI Boilerplate (work in progress)
  • Algorithmic Price Gouging in The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and the Law (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025)
  • Layered Alignment, 23 University of New Hampshire Law Review 301 (2025)
  • Generative Contracts, 56 ARIZONA STATE LAW JOURNAL 1503 (2024)
  • Contractual Complexity, 48 DELAWARE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE LAW 325 (2024)
  • Algorithmic Price Gouging in THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE LAW (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024)
  • LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models, co-authored with Guha et al., 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)
  • Edge Contracts, 25 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA JOURNAL OF BUSINESS LAW 839 (2023)
  • Contract Maps, 91 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-KANSAS CITY LAW REVIEW 343 (2022)
  • Contracts as Systems, 45 DELAWARE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE LAW 219 (2021)
  • Predictive Contracting, 2019 COLUMBIA BUSINESS LAW REVIEW 621
  • Venture Capital Contract Design: An Empirical Analysis of the Connection Between Bargaining Power and Venture Financing Contract Terms, 23 FORDHAM JOURNAL OF CORPORATE & FINANCIAL LAW 105 (2017)
    • Cited in Basho Technologies Holdco B LLC v. Georgetown Basho Investors LLC, C.A. No. 11802-VCL (Del. Ch. July 6, 2018)