Many people think of Patricia Williams as a constitutional lawyer. The university distinguished professor of law and humanities has spent decades integrating seemingly disparate areas of the law, including race, property interests and the legacy of slavery; the biotech revolution in healthcare; and, more recently, how algorithms and AI systems shape our understanding of ourselves and our lives.
But Williams, who also directs the Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives, has long thought of herself differently. Fundamentally, she is a contracts law expert, focused on an area of the law concerned with how people or private parties formalize their contractual obligations to each other. “I’ve really written about contracts; what I think and talk about are the limits of contracts,” Williams told Northeastern Global News.
