News & Commentary written by Esha Bhandari

Esha Bhandari is deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on litigation and advocacy to protect freedom of expression and privacy rights in the digital age. She also focuses on the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on civil liberties. She has litigated cases including Sandvig v. Barr, a First Amendment challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on behalf of online discrimination researchers, Alasaad v. Wolf, a constitutional challenge to suspicionless electronic device searches at the U.S. border, and Guan v. Mayorkas, in which she represents journalists questioned about their work by border officers. She argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Hansen, a case that significantly narrowed a federal law that, on its face, criminalized First Amendment-protected speech about immigration.

Esha is an Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, where she co-teaches the Technology, Law, and Policy Clinic. She contributed a chapter to the treatise Feminist Cyberlaw on the legal landscape for digital journalism and research. She also serves as a board member of the nonprofit Partnership on AI, and as a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, Law Enforcement Subcommittee, a body tasked with advising the President on issues in artificial intelligence.

Esha was previously an Equal Justice Works fellow with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. She is a graduate of McGill University, where she was a Loran Scholar and received the Allen Oliver Gold Medal in Political Science, of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and of Columbia Law School, where she received the Robert Noxon Toppan Prize in Constitutional Law and the Archie O. Dawson Prize for Advocacy. She served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.