Andrew Torrance
Visiting Professor of Law
Home Affiliation: Paul E. Wilson Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas School of Law
Associate Dean, Graduate and International Law, University of Kansas School of Law
Staff Assistant: Mary Juckett
Website: www.law.ku.edu/torrance
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SSRN: View
Dr. Andrew W. Torrance is the Paul E. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Graduate and International Law at the University of Kansas School of Law, and a Visiting Scholar in Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University, his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his Bachelor of Science from Queen's University in Canada. In 2022 he was elected to the American Law Institute, and in 2008 he served as a policy advisor on the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Committee of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Torrance teaches and writes in patent law, intellectual property, innovation, food and drug regulation, biotechnology and biodiversity law, and the empirical, experimental, and big-data study of legal systems. A growing share of his recent work concerns the law and governance of artificial intelligence, including the legal treatment of training data, the regulation of autonomous systems, and the conditions under which advanced AI might function as a cooperative participant in legal and social order rather than merely as an object of control. Grounded in evolutionary biology and innovation theory, this research asks how the institutions that have long constitutionalized concentrations of human power might be extended to artificial ones
He founded the Biolaw conference (a progenitor of the annual BioLawlapalooza) and co-founded PatCon, the annual patent scholarship conference. From 2019 to 2021, he led intellectual property at the Eli and Edythe Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Torrance has delivered about four hundred scholarly presentations or guest lectures in more than a dozen countries, including talks to the World Intellectual Property Organization, the OECD, the National Academies, Google, and Microsoft Research, as well as a TEDx address. He has written a book entitled FORWARD: HOW INNOVATION HYPERCYCLES TRIGGER TECHNOLOGY AND POWER PROSPERITY. His scholarship has appeared in the Northwestern Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, the Stanford Technology Law Review, the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Strategy Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Scientific Reports, and his research and perspectives have been covered by Reuters, The Associated Press, The Economist, Investor’s Business Daily, Financial Times, The Times of London, The Spectator, The Globe and Mail, Forbes, USA Today, Wired, Kansas City Star, Seattle Times, New York Times Upfront Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, PBS, NPR, BBC Radio 4, Bloomberg Radio, Radio One (United States Virgin Islands), WREK, KCTV, and ABC Television News (Topeka, Kansas).
Professor Torrance loves teaching, and has taught Patent Law, Intellectual Property, Legal Analytics, Biolaw, Food and Drug Law, Biodiversity Law, and Conservation Biology. His teaching has been recognized with the Dean Frederick T. Moreau Teaching and Mentoring Award in both 2018 and 2024.