Gaia Bernstein is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for Universal Education in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. She is also a law professor, co-director of the Institute for Privacy Protection, and co-director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology at the Seton Hall University School of Law.
Bernstein specializes in law and technology, focusing on addictive technologies, social media regulation and artificial intelligence regulation, with a particular emphasis on harms to children. She has spoken about these issues from the TEDx stage to the World Economic Forum and regularly appears on diverse media outlets, from general news interviews to wellness and parenting shows.
Bernstein’s book “Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies” was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. It has been featured and excerpted by Wired magazine, Time magazine, and the Boston Globe. It has received numerous recognitions, including selection as one of the Next Big Idea Club’s must-read books and as a finalist for the PROSE Award in legal studies, the International Book Awards in general nonfiction, and the American Book Fest Award in business-technology.
Bernstein’s current book project is titled “Technologies of Loneliness.” In 2026, she received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship to work on the book. In her upcoming book, Bernstein develops a public health approach to regulating technology, particularly artificial intelligence. In her 2026 Brookings policy brief, “From Bans to Recalls: A Public Health Framework for AI Companion Bots,” she argued that policymakers should treat the impact of AI companions on children as a public health problem and use recalls as a central tool.
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Current Positions
- Professor of Technology, Privacy, and Policy, Seton Hall University School of Law
- Founder and Co-Director, Seton Hall Institute for Privacy Protection
- Co-Director, Gibbons Institute of Law Science and Technology, Seton Hall University School of Law