In his farewell speech on January 15, 2025, President Joe Biden warned about “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex.” To use the “industrial complex” phrase, as Biden must have known, is to risk association with a strongly conspiratorial bent in U.S. culture and politics. Nevertheless, the “industrial complex” captures an important idea: that legal institutions can, whether intentionally or unwittingly, foster forms of power and influence that threaten to break free of liberal constraints.

This project charts the rise and impact of tech companies in public governance. It both maps the legal origins of the tech-industrial complex and describes the entrenchment of tech companies within the state itself. Bloch-Wehba argues that seeing the tech-industrial complex as a key instrument of contemporary governance also illuminates problematic disjunctions between constitutional doctrine and our contemporary political order. 

Bio:

Hannah Bloch-Wehba is CITP’s Microsoft Visiting Professor for fall 2025. She is a legal scholar, expert on law and technology, and member of the faculty at Texas A&M University School of Law. Her scholarship focuses on how technological change reshapes public governance, with consequences for civil liberties, transparency, and accountability. Her award-winning articles on these topics have appeared or are forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, California Law Review, BYU Law Review, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Fordham Law Review, and many other journals. Bloch-Wehba’s fellowships include the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Weizenbaum Institute (Berlin). Prior to joining the faculty at Texas A&M, Bloch-Wehba taught at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law and at Yale Law School. She is also an affiliated fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and an affiliated scholar at NYU School of Law’s Policing Project. Bloch-Wehba is a graduate of NYU School of Law, where she was an Institute for International Law & Justice/Law and Security Scholar, and of the University of Texas at Austin.

In-person attendance is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students.

This talk will be livestreamed and recorded. The recording will be posted to the CITP website, the Princeton University Media Central channel and the CITP YouTube channel.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu.

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