professor
zachary catanzaro
I am an Assistant Professor of Law at Widener University Delaware Law School. My scholarship examines how emerging technologies transform foundational legal concepts including property, sovereignty, and interpretation, with particular attention to the commodification of meaning through art and technology. My testimony before the U.S. Copyright Office was cited in the 2024 joint USPTO–Copyright Office report to Congress on NFTs and intellectual property. My recent work has appeared in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology and is forthcoming in the Florida Law Review.
recent projects
My current research, Artificial Alignment and the Law of Annihilation, argues that AI alignment operates as a new form of enclosure, converting the collective knowledge embedded in the linguistic commons into private ownership. This work builds on Sovereignty in the Technological Singularity, recently published in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology, and The Dead Law Theory, forthcoming in the Florida Law Review, which examines what becomes of legal interpretation when meaning is simulated by statistical models. This year, I presented The Dead Law Theory at the Internet Law Scholars Conference at Cornell Law School and contributed two chapters, on AI fundamentals and on transparency and explainability, to Mastering Artificial Intelligence, forthcoming from Carolina Academic Press.
The Dead Law Theory: The Perils of Simulated Interpretation, (forthcoming Florida Law Review 2027)
The Law of Digital Content, (ABA Publications 2025)
Sovereignty in the Singularity,
28 Yale J. L. & Tech. 671 (2026)
Ghosts in the Machine: Training AI to Outlive Us, Tedx Talk
Algorithmic Dead Hands: What is Dead May Never Die, 35 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 83 (2024)
Beyond Incentives: Copyright in the Age of Algorithmic Production, 13 NYU J. of Intellectual Property & Ent. L. 1 (2024)
