Position Title
Acting Professor of Law
Sarah Polcz studies how law allocates the value generated by creative and intellectual work, most recently in the context of artificial intelligence. With Jeremy Bearer-Friend of GW Law, she developed the AI equity tax framework that Senator Bernie Sanders adopted in the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (S. 4825), introduced in June 2026. The framework and resulting legislation have attracted extensive national and international media attention, including in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Nation, and The Information. Her current empirical project, based on interviews with frontier AI researchers, examines trade secrecy and the legal and professional norms governing the circulation of knowledge within AI labs.
Polcz’s broader research draws on psychological science to examine intellectual property law and market institutions. Her large-scale empirical research on royalty sharing in the music industry has been featured in Record Collector and other music and entertainment publications. Her work has been published in the Southern California Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Tax Law, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Journal of Law and the Biosciences, The American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, and Social Psychology and Justice.
- B.A., Philosophy, Queen’s University Canada
- J.D., Queen’s University Canada
- MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University College London
- J.S.D., Stanford Law School
- Intellectual Property
- Trade Secrets and Knowledge Governance
- Artificial Intelligence and the Law
- Tax Policy
- Law and Psychological Science
- Fellow, Stanford Law School's Center for Law and the Biosciences
Publications
Law Review Articles and Chapters in Books
Sharing the Algorithm, 17 COLUM. J. TAX. L. 1 (2025) (with Jeremy Bearer-Friend).
Loyalties v. Royalties, 74 UC Hastings L.J. 765 (2023).
Co-Creating Equality, 96 S. Cal. L. Rev. 607 (2023).
Integrating Three Theoretical Traditions in Distributive Justice and Social Exchange Research, in Social Psychology and Justice (E. Allan Lind ed., Routledge, 2020) (with Robert J. MacCoun).
Regulating Genetic Advantage, 32 Harv. J. L. & Tech. 266 (2018) (with Anna Lewis).
A Menagerie of Moral Hazards: Regulating Genetically Modified Animals, 46 J.L. Med. & Ethics 180 (2018) (with Anna Lewis).
CRISPR-Cas9 and the Non-Germline Non-Controversy, 3 J.L. & Biosciences 413 (2016) (with Anna Lewis).
Public Writing
Book Reviews
Book Review, 51 L. & Soc’y Rev. 462 (2017) (reviewing Susanna L. Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (2016)).
Book Review, 50 L. & Soc’y Rev. 549 (2016) (reviewing Ellen Wiles, Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition (2015)).