Biography

Elana Zeide is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law. She teaches, writes, and consults on privacy, artificial intelligence, education technology, and the modern-day “permanent record,” with a focus on how schools, employers, and governments use data and AI to make decisions about people, and what law should require of them.

Her recent work addresses online proctoring and school surveillance, the adoption of artificial intelligence in learning, admissions, and hiring, and the gaps in student and child privacy law. In The Silicon Ceiling, she shows how artificial intelligence can construct an invisible barrier to opportunity. Her forthcoming article, Unreasonable School Surveillance (Wisconsin Law Review, 2026), argues that AI-driven monitoring, which follows students home, records them continuously, and claims to read their thoughts and feelings, requires courts to reconsider how the Fourth Amendment applies in schools, and that a school’s own educational mission weighs against the surveillance it deploys.

Zeide previously served as a PULSE Fellow in Artificial Intelligence Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, an Associate Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and a Microsoft Research Fellow at New York University’s Information Law Institute. She is a Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, an affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute, and a member of the Future of Privacy Forum’s advisory board.

Zeide received her B.A. in American Studies from Yale University, her M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts, and her J.D. and LL.M. in Taxation from New York University School of Law. She worked as a Litigation Associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and a Legal Analyst at Bloomberg Media before opening her own privacy, media, and platform law practice. Before becoming an attorney, she was a journalist and pop culture columnist in London and New York. She believes she is the only person to have both reported for and legally represented The National Enquirer.