The 2026 Brennan Lecture

America’s Intergovernmental Law, presented by Professor Bridget Fahey from The University of Chicago Law School. Bridget Fahey Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School Bridget Fahey is an expert in constitutional law and the law of data. Her work on federalism documents and theorizes the unexpected ways the federal government and states interact and the unorthodox legal tools they use to structure their joint projects. Her research on data focuses on the legal and technical rules that structure the government’s access to and use of data, and more broadly the manner in which the public law of data differs from the law governing other forms of power. Professor Fahey is an affiliated scholar the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute and Co-Director of the Institute’s Data Ecology Research Initiative. Professor Fahey’s recent co-authored article, Layered Constitutionalism, 124 Colum. L. Rev. 1295 (2024), identifies and theorizes a largely hidden body of federal constitutional rules that shape state structural choices. Her prior article, Coordinated Rulemaking and Cooperative Federalism’s Administrative State, 132 Yale L.J. 1213 (2023), argues that cooperative federalism programs have given rise to a distinctive administrative state—with forms of administrative action and legal frameworks that diverge in important respects from ordinary federal and state administrative law. And an earlier article, Federalism by Contract, 129 Yale L.J. 2326 (2020), revealed the federal government and states longstanding use of contract-like instruments to structure intergovernmental programs and transact in a wide range of governmental powers. Before joining the Chicago faculty, her article Consent Procedures and American Federalism, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 1561 (2015), identified and theorized the federal government’s practice of using cooperative federalism programs to intervene in and reshape state and local governing processes. Professor Fahey also leads interdisciplinary work on the law of data, focusing particularly on government stewardship of private data. Her forthcoming co-authored article, The Structural Law of Data, develops a new account of data’s structural law—the processes, institutional arrangements, transparency rules, and control mechanisms that shape the federal government’s access to, and use of, private data. It builds on a prior article, Data Federalism, 135 Harv. L. Rev. 1107 (2022), which uncovers an extensive intergovernmental market in private data exchanged by federal, state, and local governments, and the unusual cross-governmental bureaucracies that govern that market. Another forthcoming co-authored article, The Law of Information States: Evidence from China and the United States, theorizes how law can be used to combat government misinformation and introduces the idea of “information federalism.” Professor Fahey’s work helps form the basis of interdisciplinary research funded by the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, where she serves as a co-director of the Data Ecology Research Initiative. Professor Fahey received a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty, she was a litigator at the Washington DC office of WilmerHale, held a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was a law clerk on the DC Circuit and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier in her career, Professor Fahey worked as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and Berlin. She teaches 1L Contracts and Constitutional Law, co-coordinates the Public Law Workshop, and has taught informal Greenberg Seminars on eclectic topics including Free Speech on Campus, Space Law, Order Without Law, and others.