Kendra Albert

Technology Lawyer

Hey there! I’m Kendra, a public interest technology lawyer and an “undisciplined” scholar of computing, gender, and society.

Right now, I’m taking some time off before starting something new. I am a radical generalist and will work on pretty much anything technology-related.

For the last seven years, I worked at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, where I practiced (and taught students how to practice) technology law. Some (public) highlights include:

  • Helping Fight for the Future, an digital rights advocacy organization, fight back against a retaliatory and overbroad subpoena from Proctorio, an e-proctoring company.
  • Working with sex worker art collective Veil Machine to provide legal support for their art show E-Viction, that protested digital gentrification.
  • Representing Paul Kruczynski when he received a takedown letter from Instagram for his use of the Instagram trademark in the domain name “dontuseinstagram.com.”

My scholarship and other public work focus on questions of digital technology and power, especially in relationship to gender and sexuality. Some representative examples:

  • My legal scholarship focuses on FOSTA/SESTA, a 2018 law that changed how liability worked for online platforms around sex trafficking and prostitution. The best place to start with that work is my essay Five Reflections from Five Years of FOSTA/SESTA, which summarizes what working with sex workers in the aftermath of FOSTA has taught me.
  • With Maggie Delano, I’ve written about how non-binary people are excluded from “smart scales” and what this means about the use of sex/gender in research more generally in This Whole Thing Smacks of Gender and Sex Trouble.
  • With Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and others, I’ve written and spoken about how to apply law to adversarial attacks on machine learning systems. Our Blackhat talk “Smashing the ML Stack for Fun and Lawsuits” is a great summary.

I also held an appointment as a lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, where I taught classes on gender and technology and transgender rights and the law. In 2019, I founded the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment (IfRFA), which provides funding and support for law students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in First Amendment law. Until summer 2024, I served as IfRFA’s director, working alongside the incredible Jasjot Kaur.

When I’m not working or teaching or writing, I try to make the world suck less. I consult on issues related to harassment, and I reinvest money from that work into community mutual aid. Other than that, I spend my free time reading, playing video games, and cooking.

I post regularly on Mastodon at @Kendraserra@dair-community.social, and mostly lurk on Bluesky. I occasionally blog about things I’ve been thinking about. Reach me by email at kendra dot serra at gmail dot com. My pronouns are they/them/theirs. For more info on my background and accomplishments, feel free to peruse my CV.

Photo by Kathy Pham.