About
Dr. Susan Tanner brings a distinctive blend of academic excellence, technological innovation, and practical legal experience to the Brandeis School of Law. Her work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, linguistics and law has established her as an international authority on generative AI in legal practice. She studied law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and rhetoric and composition at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, where she collaborated with leading scholars in rhetoric and digital humanities, machine learning, cognitive brain science and law and linguistics. Her doctoral dissertation combined computational and corpus linguistics, and argument theory to analyze legal opinions as a genre.
Dr. Tanner has been teaching and researching the science of learning for more than two decades. At Carnegie Mellon University, she taught courses in professional writing, privacy law and writing about public problems, and served as Assistant Director of First-Year Writing, where she led evidence-based curriculum redesign and program assessment initiatives. Her scholarship on legal education has appeared in numerous legal pedagogy journals including The Second Draft, Prompt and Perspectives, and she is a co-author and co-editor for "Legal Argumentation," an open educational resource textbook for legal writing.
Dr. Tanner's legal scholarship focuses on privacy law, artificial intelligence, and law, rhetoric and corpus linguistics. Her articles have been published in numerous journals including Creighton Law Review, Mitchell Hamline Law Review and the Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal, and she also contributed to a Cambridge University Press edited collection. Her work in comparative law encompasses civil law systems, Navajo legal traditions and legal cultural competence and linguistic accessibility in Gulf Cooperation Council countries.
Before joining UofL, Dr. Tanner practiced at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, where she specialized in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions and legal analytics. Prior to her legal career, she held executive positions in the modeling and talent industry, and taught and tutored high school.