Professor Karen Yeung
Contact details
Email: karen.yeung@kcl.ac.uk
Tel: (0)20 7848 2465
Room: SW3.03
Biography
After completing a combined Law/Commerce degree at the
University of Melbourne, Karen Yeung came to the United Kingdom in 1993 as a
Rhodes Scholar to read for the Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford University where
she also completed her D Phil. Following this, she spent ten years as a
University Lecturer at Oxford University and as a Fellow of St Anne’s College,
Oxford. Professor Yeung joined the Dickson Poon School of Law as a Chair in Law
in September 2006. She joined the School to help establish the Centre for
Technology, Law & Society (‘TELOS’), of which she is now Director. In that role, she is keen to foster
collaboration between academics across various disciplines concerned with
examining the social, political and ethical implications of technological
development, and in seeking to promote informed, reflective technology policy
making and implementation.
Professor Yeung has established an international reputation
in two fields: as an academic pioneer in helping to establish the intellectual
coherence and value of regulation studies (or ‘regulatory governance’ studies)
as a field of scholarly inquiry (with a recent interest in regulation within
healthcare contexts) and as a leading scholar concerned with critically
examining the governance of, and governance through, new and emerging
technologies.
She has acted as advisor to various government bodies and
policy-makers, including the Department of Health, The Health Service Research
Network, the National Audit Office, Department of Community and Local
Government, The Bar Standards Board, and the Australian competition regulator
(the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission) and has contributed to
several governmental reform projects in the area of regulatory
enforcement. She is admitted to practice
as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia),
having completed a brief stint in professional legal practice.
Research interests and PhD supervision
Professor Yeung’s research interests lie in two broadly
defined fields of governance: understanding regulatory governance regimes, and
the regulation and governance of, and governance through, new and emerging
technologies. For her, not only is regulation an important mechanism of
social control and form of governance, but also a dynamic and contested site of
human interaction. Her interest in new and emerging technologies focuses on
interrogating the multiple (yet often opaque) ways in which ‘design’ can be
employed as an instrument of government, with the aim of intentionally
influencing the behaviour of others, while recognising that new technologies
generate novel risks which may themselves call for regulation.
Her work is distinctive in its interdisciplinary
orientation, drawing on a range of social-scientific disciplines (including
politics, economics and sociology) whilst giving prominence to law and
underlying constitutional principles.
Karen’s first book, Securing Compliance (Hart Publishing,
Oxford 2004) critically examines the use of bargaining and punishment as
regulatory compliance techniques, seeking to flesh out whether there are any
principled limits to their legitimate use. Building on her experience of
teaching Regulation at Oxford University, she later co-authored (with Bronwen
Morgan) An Introduction to Law and Regulation (Law in Context Series, Cambridge
University Press, 2007). It sets out to provide a conceptual map to those who
are new to the field of regulation as well as a helpful resource for
established scholars, drawing from a range of perspectives in law and the
social sciences. She is currently completing the Oxford Handbook on the Law and
Regulation of Technology, which she is editing with Roger Brownsword and Eloise
Scotford. The work seeks to explore the implications for law and regulation of new
technologies, provoking reflection on law’s nature, role and the challenges it
faces in light of technological development (including the use of technology in
regulation) and to explore the implications for regulation and governance of
technological development.
A central theme animating her work focuses on the
implications of design-based regulatory techniques for accountability and
legitimacy, including the way in which they implicate (or fail to implicate)
democratic, constitutional and ethical values. Her current research encompasses three broad concerns. The first seeks to explore the legitimacy of
sophisticated algorithmic techniques associated with so-called ‘Big Data’
revolution and the rise of predictive analytics. Because these analytic techniques enable the
‘deep personalisation’ of an individual’s digital information environment based
on comprehensive real-time tracking and analysis of a person’s digital traces, they have the potential to act as a particularly powerful, pervasive yet insidious
form of ‘soft’ design-based control.
Hence, she is currently undertaking a series of investigations concerning
the use of ‘Big Data’ as a mode of design-based regulation, seeking to
interrogate the implications for regulatory accountability and legitimacy
associated with the rise of algorithmic decision-making by both public and
private actors.
The second area of research seeks to interrogate the regulation of
technological risk in the transnational realm.
Together with Professor Peer Zumbansen, she is developing a
transnationalised perspective on technological innovation that investigates how
notions of technological ‘risk’, ‘progress’, ‘growth’, and ‘development’ are
perceived at a concrete, local level whilst being embedded and shaped by global
and transnational forces and dynamics to provide a richer, contextualised and
more realistic understanding of the ways in which these core ideas evolve over
time and space.
The third area explores the ways in which new and emerging technologies are increasingly directed at
redesigning biological organisms, including human beings, as instruments for
securing non-health related goals. These
techniques include pharmacological and neurological interventions that operate
directly on human physiological functioning (for example, the chemical
castration of convicted sex offenders by several states in the US to reduce the
risk which such individuals are adjudged to pose to the public on release from
prison.) Her overarching intellectual
ambition is to draw together these three strands and extend her work on
design-based regulation as part of a larger project to understand the use of
‘Governance by Design’ that is made possible by the kinds of technologies that
are emerging in the 21st century.
She welcomes PhD students interested in technological
governance, with a particular emphasis on the way in which technologies are
used as public policy instruments, and in regulatory governance regimes more
generally.
Selected publications
Books
- Oxford Handbook on the Law and Regulation of Technology Oxford University Press, Oxford (with Roger Brownsword and Eloise Scotford), 2015, forthcoming
- An Introduction to Law and Regulation, Cambridge University Press, Law In Context series (with Bronwen Morgan), April 2007.
- Securing Compliance, Hart Publishing (Oxford, 2004)
Other
View full list of Professor Yeung’s publications.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Graduate
- Regulatory Policy and Practice
- Understanding Regulation