Joshua Mitts

Joshua Mitts, who joined the faculty in 2017 as associate professor of law and was named professor of law in 2022, uses advanced data science for his research on corporate and securities law. His primary focus is on informed trading in capital markets and related topics in law and finance. Mitts employs empirical methods, including statistical analysis and machine learning, for his research on short selling, securities lending, informed trading on cybersecurity breaches, information leakage and hedge fund activism, insider trading on corporate disclosures, and information transmission in financial markets.

Mitts’s interest in data science dates back to high school when he won the Microsoft Windows Forms Coding Hero Award for developing software for the Microsoft .NET platform. To help practitioners and scholars better communicate with software engineers, he introduced the course Data and Predictive Coding for Lawyers to the Law School curriculum. He taught at the Columbia Law Summer Program in American Law in Amsterdam in 2019.

Mitts frequently speaks at conferences, symposiums, and workshops. He recently presented a new paper, “A Legal Perspective on Technology and the Capital Markets: Social Media, Short Activism and the Algorithmic Revolution,” at the New Special Study of the Securities Markets/FINRA Technology Conference hosted by the Columbia Law School Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, where he is a fellow. Mitts is also a member of the Center for Financial and Business Analytics at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute.