Akanbi Wins Yale Law Journal Essay Competition

Doctoral Candidate Opeyemi Akanbi has been announced as one of two winners of the Yale Law Journal’s first ever Student and Recent Graduate Essay Competition.

Open to law students and recent law graduates nationwide, the competition encourages legal scholars to examine and interpret developing legal challenges. This year’s competition specifically targeted burgeoning issues at the intersection of law and technology, including but not limited to: surveillance, cybersecurity, digital speech, artificial intelligence, and privacy.

Akanbi’s essay, “Policing Work Boundaries on the Cloud,” explores the shifting conceptualization of labor in the digital age due to increased use of cloud computing software. Akanbi examines how applications like Slack, Workplace, and Teams – which blur the boundaries of work by eliminating space and time constraints – can be reconciled with current labor laws that are based on a separation between work and nonwork.

Currently a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School, Akanbi is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and is a member of the New York bar. She studies media policy issues like net neutrality and the use of digital media technologies in the context of labor and privacy. She has been a fellow with the Consortium on Media Policy Studies and a guest scholar at the Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy.

As a winner of the essay competition, Akanbi’s paper will be published in the Yale Law Journal Forum, and she will receive a monetary prize.