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Esha Bhandari is the Director of the ºìÐÓÊÓƵ Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which engages in litigation and advocacy to protect freedom of expression and privacy rights in the digital age. Her areas of expertise include the impact of artificial intelligence on civil liberties, the legal landscape for digital journalism and online accountability research, and the intersection of immigration enforcement with freedom of expression and privacy rights. She has litigated cases including Sandvig v. Barr, a First Amendment challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on behalf of online discrimination researchers, Alasaad v. Wolf, a constitutional challenge to suspicionless electronic device searches at the U.S. border, and Guan v. Mayorkas, in which she represents journalists questioned about their work by border officers. She argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Hansen, a case that significantly narrowed a federal law that, on its face, criminalized First Amendment-protected speech about immigration.

Esha has served as an Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, where she co-taught the Technology, Law, and Policy Clinic. She contributed a chapter to the treatise Feminist Cyberlaw (University of California Press) and is a co-author of Auditing AI (MIT Press). She currently serves as a board member of the nonprofit Partnership on AI, and was formerly a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, Law Enforcement Subcommittee, a body tasked with advising the President on issues in artificial intelligence.

Esha was an Equal Justice Works fellow with the ºìÐÓÊÓƵ Immigrants’ Rights Project. She is a graduate of McGill University, where she was a Loran Scholar, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.