Kathryn Kleiman
Adjunct Professor
WCL Adjunct Faculty
Bio
Kathryn Kleiman teaches Internet Technology & Governance for Lawyers at AUWCL and advises Internet, emerging technologies, privacy, civil liberties and human rights writing projects. For three years, she taught in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic as Practitioner-in-Residence (2019-2022).
Ms. Kleiman is a recognized leader in Internet policy and governance. As part of the group that founded the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), she has spent 25 years helping to oversee and manage the Internet infrastructure and its global domain name system (DNS). As part of ICANN’s Multistakeholder Model, she served on numerous ICANN policy development groups, including the Final Drafting Team of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy writing global rules for domain name disputes, Vice-Chair of the WHOIS Review Team, and Co-Chair of the Review of All Rights Protection Mechanisms PDP Working Group reviewing of trademark protections for new top level domains.
In 2018, Ms. Kleiman joined Princeton University as a Visiting Research Scholar with the interdisciplinary Center for Information Technology Policy. Prior to academia, she worked at the telecommunications law firm of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth in Arlington, Virginia, where she co-founded the Internet Law & Policy Group. She also served as Director of Policy for the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry running .ORG domain names (now numbering 11 million), and now serves on its Board of Directors. Prior to law school, she worked on Wall Street managing international data networks and auditing data security.
Ms. Kleiman’s research and advocacy interests include fair and balanced rules for Internet governance and new technologies and clear protections for free speech, freedom of assembly, fair use, privacy and due process in the intellectual property and other governance systems of the Internet infrastructure and new technologies. Kleiman studies multistakeholder models as ways for communities to oversee and set guardrails for new technologies that are ahead of the regulatory curve.
An award-winning author and documentary producer, Kleiman’s book, Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) won the IEEE Middleton Award in 2023, and is now translated into Korean and Japanese. Her documentary, The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at the United Nations Association Film Festival in 2016.
Kleiman is a Senior Fellow with AUWCL’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and Tech, Law & Security Program and a longtime Faculty Fellow with AU’s Internet Governance Lab. She speaks on topics of Internet governance, multistakeholder cooperation, and the history of early computing and its pioneers in forums across the country and around the world.
Kleiman is affiliated faculty with the AU School of Communication and Department of Computer Science. She graduated from Harvard University and Boston University School of Law.
