MELODY CHEN
I’m a 1L at the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings), where I’m currently building my legal foundation through bar courses in Contracts, Civil Procedure, Property, and Legal Writing. I am interested in law and tech (AI, social media), and global governance, and plan to sit for the bar in 2028.
I graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2024 with a double major in Statistics & Data Science and Philosophy. My undergraduate work spanned political communication, semiconductor policy, and applied machine learning. I co-authored a forthcoming paper on partisan social sorting in news media, presented at the 2024 American Political Science Association conference, and previously interned at the Brookings Institution’s AI and Emerging Tech Initiative, where I contributed data visualizations and content analysis for a project on misinformation in political podcasts that was later featured in The New York Times [linked 1 and 2].
I also contributed to a legal research tracker led by former Mayer Brown partner Dominique Shelton Leipzig, monitoring AI legislation across 100+ countries. In this role, I prepared briefing materials and shared updates with professionals at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) and Mayer Brown offices in Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong. I also supported planning and speaker engagement for the 2024 Digital Trust Summit, which convened U.S. lawmakers, UN officials, and Fortune 100 executives to discuss board and CEO accountability for AI oversight.
Outside of law and policy, I’ve written for local and college newspapers, engaged with philosophical arguments, and gave a TEDx Talk on the history and power of distractions in media. I occasionally share personal essays on philosophy on my Substack newsletter