Biography

Rafael Nunes is a J.S.D. Candidate at Yale Law School, where he is interested in law and technology with a research focus on platform governance and speech, where he is an Information Society Project Visiting Fellow. Rafael was a guest researcher at the Social Science Research Center of Berlin (WZB) and a Yale Public Interest Fellow at Access Now (2020-21). He was a Fox Fellow at El Colegio de Mexico (2018-2019). He holds a Master of Laws from Yale Law School (2018), a Master of Laws in Public Law from the University of São Paulo (2015), and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the Federal University of Maranhão (2013).

His research agenda has two prongs: he asks how the challenges of managing digital speech at scale shape varying national courts and bureaucracies’ regulatory styles and intuitional trajectories; he investigates how platform firms engage in regulatory defence and why their venues and forms differ across places.

At the EUI, he will focus on how the EU’s existing political economy and institutions will shape the enforcement of newly enacted platform governance instruments, such as the DSA and DMA, and how platform firms may leverage mechanisms of regulatory diffusion (e.g., Brussels Effect) to preempt costly regulation elsewhere. He will turn chapters of his dissertation into articles and submit a related book proposal.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

• Digital transformations and society

Mentor

• Nicolas Petit