David Freeman Engstrom

David Freeman Engstrom is a legal academic and academic administrator whose work focuses on the design and implementation of litigation and regulatory regimes, access to courts, and law and technology. He graduated from Walter E. Stebbins High School in 1989, and from Dartmouth College in 1993 with an A.B., magna cum laude, in History. After college, Engstrom joined the Mississippi Teacher Corps and taught high school English and coached football. He then attended Oxford University as a Fulbright Scholar, earning an M.Sc. in Economic and Social History in 1997. In 2002, Engstrom graduated with a J.D., Order of the Coif and with honors, from Stanford Law School, where he edited the Stanford Law Review. He also holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.

Academic career Engstrom joined the Stanford Law School faculty in 2009. He became Professor of Law in 2014.

In 2020, Engstrom was a principal adviser to the Administrative Conference of the United States and co-author of a major report with Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, Daniel Ho, and Catherine Sharkey on the use of artificial intelligence by federal agencies. In 2023, Engstrom published a book, Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice. In 2021, Engstrom co-founded the Filing Fairness Project, a collaboration between Stanford Law School and six states to improve court filing processes for self-represented litigants. In 2021, Engstrom was named the Co-Director, with his colleague and spouse, Nora Freeman Engstrom, of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, named for their former colleague, Deborah Rhode. In 2022, the American Law Institute appointed Engstrom the Reporter for the project, Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication.

Engstrom is an appointed member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Engstrom has published legal commentaries in the New York Times, Slate, Bloomberg, and CNN. His history of a novel lawsuit against General Motors for sex discrimination in the 1930s was featured in Smithsonian Magazine in 2022.

Publications Engstrom's scholarship has been published in the Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review, including:

Agencies as Litigation Gatekeepers, 123 Yale L.J. 616 (2013) Digital Civil Procedure, 169 U. Pa. L. Rev. 2243 (2021) Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Future of Adversarialism, 169 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1001 (2021) (with Jonah Gelbach) Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice (editor) (Cambridge University Press 2023) Disparate Limbo: How Administrative Law Erased Antidiscrimination, 131 Yale L.J. 370 (2021) (with Cristina Ceballos and Daniel Ho) Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies (report to the Administrative Conference of the United States) (with Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Daniel Ho, and Catherine Sharkey) (2020) The Twiqbal Puzzle and Empirical Study of Civil Procedure, 65 Stan. L. Rev. 1203 (2013) Harnessing the Private Attorney General: Evidence from Qui Tam Litigation, 112 Colum. L. Rev. 1244 (2012) Regulating Government AI and the Challenge of Sociotechnical Design, 19 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 277 (2023)

Awards In 2012, Engstrom won the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Cromwell Article Prize from the American Society of Legal History.

Personal life Engstrom is married to fellow Stanford Law Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom.