Susan Tanner

Biography

Susan L. Tanner Associate Professor of Law

Dr. Susan Tanner is a nationally recognized expert on artificial intelligence in legal education and a leading voice on the intersection of technology, rhetoric, and law. Professor Tanner brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to legal education, holding both a J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law  and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University. Her dissertation, "The Rhetorical Force of the Law," used corpus and computational linguistics methods to examine the language, genre, and structure of legal opinions, establishing her expertise at the intersection of legal communication and technology.

Before entering academia, Professor Tanner practiced law at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Her diverse professional background also includes legislation and policy work at StudentsFirst and executive roles in marketing and technology startups.

Research Interests

A prolific scholar, Professor Tanner's scholarship focuses on the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on legal practice and education, privacy law in the digital age, and the rhetorical analysis of legal discourse using critical methodologies and corpus lingusitics. She has forthcoming articles in the Nevada Law Journal examining privacy as a democratic guardrail and Fourth Amendment constraints on micro-targeted persuasion, and in the Harvard Law and Policy Review analyzing judicial rhetoric post-Dobbs. Her recent publications include groundbreaking work on generative AI's impact on free speech and disinformation in the Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal and innovative methodological approaches to AI-assisted writing in Written Communication. She is also co-editor and author of the OER textbook Legal Argumentation: Reasoning & Writing About the Law and has contributed chapters to multiple books on AI, law, and rhetoric. Her work appears in titles published by Cambridge University Press and Carolina Academic Press, including contributions to Rhetorical Traditions & Contemporary Law and the forthcoming Mastering Artificial Intelligence. Her interdisciplinary research background includes work with Carnegie Mellon's CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition.

Degrees and Certifications

Publications

All Scholarly and Creative Works