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About

Woodrow Hartzog is a legal scholar and ethicist whose work sits at the intersection of technology law, consumer protection, and emerging robotics regulation. Best known for his sustained examination of how existing legal frameworks apply — and often fail — when confronted with autonomous and robotic systems, Hartzog has become a leading voice in shaping policy around human-robot interaction. His widely cited work "Unfair and Deceptive Robots" (accumulating nearly 50 citations across multiple versions) exposes how consumer protection principles such as fraud, privacy, and safety must be fundamentally rethought for a world increasingly populated by household robots, autonomous vehicles, and personal drones. His parallel research on automated law enforcement — exploring inefficiency, algorithmic encoding of legal ambiguity, and accountability gaps — challenges policymakers to look beyond the cost savings of automation toward deeper questions of justice and due process. More recently, Hartzog has turned his attention to how social robots make promises to consumers, interrogating the ethics of emotional manipulation in commercial contexts. Across more than 100 cumulative citations, his scholarship consistently argues that technologists, governments, and legal scholars must collaborate urgently before autonomous systems outpace the regulatory imagination designed to govern them.