Venable Professor of Law
Director, Saul Ewing Civil Advocacy Clinic
Co-Director, Center on Applied Feminism
mgilman@ubalt.edu
410.837.5656
John and Frances Angelos Law Center, Room 424
Administrative Assistant: Stephanie Lee,
410.837.5705
John and Frances Angelos Law Center, Room 412
Education
J.D., University of Michigan
B.A., Duke University
Areas of Expertise
Privacy Law
Civil Advocacy
Evidence
Law and Poverty
Administrative Law
Feminist Legal Theory
Before joining the faculty, Gilman was a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice; an associate at Arnold and Porter in Washington, D.C.; a law clerk to United States District Court Judge Frank A. Kaufman of the District of Maryland; and an editor of the Michigan Law Review. Her scholarship focuses on issues relating to poverty, technology, privacy, and feminist legal theory, and her articles have been published in the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, and the Fordham Law Review, among many others. She regularly writes for and speaks to the media about data privacy issues impacting marginalized communities.
Gilman directs the Saul Ewing Civil Advocacy Clinic , in which student-attorneys represent individuals and community groups in a wide array of civil litigation and law reform projects. She also teaches Evidence, Administrative Law, and Poverty Law. In 2009, she received the award for Outstanding Teaching by a Full-Time Faculty Member. Gilman was a faculty fellow at Data & Society in New York during the 2019-2020 academic year. She focused on the intersection of data privacy law with the concerns of low-income communities. In the 2023-2024 academic year, she was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown Law School, where she served as the Acting Director of the Communications and Technology Law Clinic.
She is involved in numerous groups working on behalf of low-income Marylanders. She is the past president of the board of the Public Justice Center, where she served from 2004-2014, as well as a past member of the Maryland Bar's Section Council on Delivery of Legal Services, the Committee on Litigation and Legal Priorities of the ACLU of Maryland, and the Judicial Selection Committee of the Women's Law Center. She received the 2010 University System of Maryland Board of Regents' Award for Public Service.
Gilman is the former co-chair and a member of the Scholarship Committee of the AALS Clinical Legal Education Section, and a former editor of the Clinical Law Review and the Journal of Legal Education. She is also a co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism, which works to apply the insights of feminist legal theory to legal practice and policy. She is a member of the Maryland and District of Columbia bars.
Selected Publications
Books and Book Chapters
“A Critical Class Analysis of Data-Centric Technologies” in Cambridge University Handbook on AI & The Law (Kristin Johnson & Carla Reyes eds., forthcoming 2025).
"Feminism, Privacy & Law in Cyberspace," in The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Martha Chamallas, Deborah Brake & Verna Williams eds., Oxford U. Press, 2023).
Commentary on Wyman v. James, in Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten (Kimberly Mutcherson, ed., 2020).
Chapter, "The Difference in Being Poor in Red States versus Blue States," in Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty (Ezra Rosser, ed., Cambridge U. Press, 2019).
"Wyman v. James: Privacy As a Luxury Not for the Poor," in The Poverty Canon (Ezra Rosser & Marie Failinger, eds., Univ. of Michigan Press 2016).
Becoming a Trial Lawyer, with Steven Grossman and Fredric Lederer (Carolina Academic Press 2008).
Articles and Essays
The Impact of Proptech and the Datafication of Real Estate on the Human Right to Housing, Georgetown Law Technology Review (forthcoming 2025).
Ten Empowering Strategies for Non-Directive Clinical Supervision, 31 Clinical L. Rev. (forthcoming 2025).
Participation Versus Scale: Tensions in the Practical Demands on Participatory AI , 29 First Monday, April 2024 (with Meg Young, Upol Ehsan, Ranjit Singh, Emnet Tafesse, Michele Gilman, Christina Harrington & Jacob Metcalf).
Democratizing AI: Principles for Meaningful Public Participation , Data & Society (2023).
Beyond Window Dressing: Public Participation for Marginalized Communities in the Datafied Society
, 91 Fordham L. Rev. 503 (2022).
Me, Myself and My Digital Double: Extending Sara Greene’s Stealing (Identity) from the Poor to the Challenges of Identity Verification
, 106 Minn. L. Rev. Headnotes 301 (2022).
Expanding Civil Rights to Combat Digital Discrimination on the Basis of Poverty , 75 SMU L. Rev. 571 (2022) (symposium on AI, Algorithms and Inequality).
Periods for Profit and the Rise of Menstrual Surveillance , 41 Colum. J. Gender & Law (2021).
Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyer’s Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities , Data & Society (2020).
Five Privacy Principles (from the GDPR) the United States Should Adopt to Advance Economic Justice , 52 Ariz. State L.J. 368 (2020).
The Future of Clinical Legal Scholarship , 26 Clinical L. Rev. 189 (2019).
The Surveillance Gap: The Harms of Extreme Privacy and Data Marginalization (with Rebecca Green), 42 NYU Rev. L. & Soc. Change 253 (2018).
Privacy, Poverty and Big Data: A Matrix of Vulnerabilities for Poor Americans (with Mary Madden, Karen Levy & Alice Marwick), 95 Wash. U. L. Rev. 53 ( 2017).
En-Gendering Economic Inequality , 32.1 Columbia J. of Gender & L. 1 (2016).
A Court for the One Percent: How the Supreme Court Contributes to Economic Inequality , 2 Utah L. Rev. 389 (2014).
Feminism, Democracy, and the "War on Women , 32 J. L. & Inequality 1 (2014).
The Return of the Welfare Queen , 22 J. Gender, Social Policy, & the Law 247 (2014).
Learning Critical Legal Theory Across the Curriculum: An Innovative Course in Applied Feminism , 20 The Law Teacher 5 (Spring 2014).
The Poverty Defense , 47 U. Rich. L. Rev. 495 (2013).
The Class Differential in Privacy Law , 77 Brook. L. Rev. 1389 (2012).
Presidents, Preemption, and the States , 26 Constitutional Commentary 339 (2010).
The President as Scientist-in-Chief , 45 Willamette L. Rev. 565 (2009) (symposium).
Welfare, Privacy, and Feminism , 39 U. Balt. Law Forum 1 (2009) (symposium).
Litigating Presidential Signing Statements , 16 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 131 (2007) (symposium).
Fighting Poverty With Faith: Reflections on Ten Years of Charitable Choice , 10 J. Gender Race & Just. 395 (2007) (symposium).
If At First You Don't Succeed, Sign an Executive Order: President Bush and the Expansion of Charitable Choice , 15 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts J. 1103 (2007).
Poverty and Communitarianism: Toward a Community Based Welfare System , 66 Pitt. L. Rev.721 (2005).
Charitable Choice and the Accountability Challenge: Reconciling the Need for Regulation with the First Amendment Religion Clauses , 55 Vand. L. Rev. 797 (2002).
Legal Accountability in an Era of Privatized Welfare , 89 Cal. L. Rev. 569 (2001).
Articles on Social Science Research Network
Recent Media
Quoted, Rachel Konieczny, How Maryland Law Schools Approach AI in Curriculum, Research, Daily Record, Aug. 21, 2024.
Quoted, Sam Janesch, Tighter Security for SNAP Benefits Pursued as Maryland Sees $26M in Fraud, Baltimore Sun, June 1, 2024.
Quoted, Dorothy Atkins, “Much More is Coming”: Experts See Wave of AI Related Lawsuits, Law360, April 12, 2024.
Quoted, Dwight Weingarten, Maryland Legislature Considers Online Privacy Bill, Herald Mail, March 4, 2024.
Quoted, Aitana Vargas, Big Data at School , Palabra, Sept. 23, 2023.
Quoted, Joseph Cox, "Inside Shadow Dragon, The Tool That Lets Ice Monitor Pregnancy Tracking Sites and Fortnite Players," 404 Media, Sept. 18, 2023.
Quoted, Kristin Poli, "The Most Popular Digital Abortion Clinics: Ranked by Data Privacy," Wired , Aug. 21, 2023.
Interview, “The Power of AI,” Meet the Press Reports, NBC, May 14, 2023,
Guest, "Can AI Fix Your Credit? , " MIT Tech Review Podcast, May 12, 2021.
Quoted, Amy Yurkanin, "The Tennessee Trap: How One State’s War on Medicaid Fraud Ensnares Working Moms in Alabama," AL.com, April 26, 2021.
Quoted, Katheryn Houghton, "With GOP Back at Helm, Montana Renews Push to Sniff Out Welfare Fraud," Kaiser Health Network, Feb. 25, 2021.
Author, "A Better Prescription for Algorithms," The Hill, December 24, 2020.
Author, with Meredith Broussard, "Lawgorithms: What Poverty Lawyers Need to Know About Tech, Law and Social Justice," Data & Society Databite #138, Oct. 16, 2020.
Quoted, Karen Hao, "The Coming War on the Hidden Algorithms that Trap People in Poverty," MIT Technology Review, Dec. 4, 2020.
Quoted, Prachi Gupta, "Your Data is Discriminating…Against You," Marie Claire, Oct. 1, 2020.
Author, "Coronavirus Related Debt Will Live in Digital Platforms for Years – Hurting Americans’ Ability to Get Job, Apartments and Credit," The Conversation, June 1, 2020.
Quoted, Stephanie Wykstra, "It Was Supposed to Detect Fraud. It Wrongfully Accused Thousands Instead , " The Atlantic, June 7, 2020.