Liza Vertinsky

Liza Vertinsky is a professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, specializing in the regulation of emerging technologies. Her research identifies where and how existing public governance and private market structures are failing to serve essential public welfare goals — a framework she applies to the challenge of revitalizing the local news ecosystem in a digital world.

Her multidisciplinary approach is informed by her graduate training and experiences clerking for Judge Stanley Marcus on the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit, followed by a decade of legal practice in the Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem. Working through the dot-com bubble, she represented startups, venture capitalists, and universities, witnessing firsthand how an undue focus on short-term profits can create long-term structural fragilities. Her PhD research and subsequent book on the economic organization of street gangs demonstrated how counterproductive legal interventions can destabilize local communities.

In her current work, she explores legal and policy interventions that can contribute to rebuilding independent local news as a vital democratic infrastructure. Technological, economic, political, and cultural challenges to traditional local newsrooms have all contributed to emerging local news deserts, which in turn have fueled polarization and jeopardized democracy.

Vertinsky’s project, “Reimagining Local News Ecosystems for a Digital World,” will bring together leading experts from communications and journalism, business, law, economics, data science, sociology, and technology in order to identify key attributes of an independent, self-sustaining digital local news ecosystem, along with the structural changes and infrastructure needed to support it.

May 2026