Anu Bradford

Anu Bradford is one of the world’s foremost experts on the European Union’s regulatory power and its influence on the global economy. A Columbia Law School professor and former EU competition lawyer, Bradford coined the term “the Brussels Effect” to describe how EU rules from data privacy to digital markets, are increasingly shaping global standards. 

Her 2020 book by the same name was hailed by Foreign Affairs as one of the year’s best. In her latest work, Digital Empires, Bradford turns her focus to the geopolitical struggle over tech governance, offering a sharp and timely analysis of how the EU, US and China are charting competing digital futures. The book won the 2024 Stein Rokkan Prize and was named a Financial Times Best Book of the Year.

As governments across the world scramble to regulate artificial intelligence, online speech, and digital monopolies, Anu Bradford’s insights are widely sought by lawmakers, regulators, and the media. She argues that Europe’s stringent digital rules are often blamed wrongly for the continent’s lagging tech sector. Drawing on original research, she points instead to deep structural constraints: fragmented capital markets, inflexible labour laws, weak scaling opportunities, and a comparative failure to attract and retain tech talent. Bradford’s work challenges prevailing narratives and reframes the debate on whether tech innovation and regulation are truly at odds.

Anu Bradford directs the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School and is a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Chazen Institute for Global Business. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before entering academia, she practiced law in Brussels and advised the Finnish Parliament and European Parliament on economic policy. She was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010.

Bradford speaks frequently at global forums and is regularly featured in The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. At a time when the EU’s regulatory clout is being tested by geopolitical rivalry and digital disruption, Anu Bradford’s work offers one of the clearest lenses through which to understand the stakes.