Daniel Sokol wears many hats in his roles as professor, scholar, director and antitrust law expert
USC Gould School of Law Professor D. Daniel Sokol, who specializes in the intersection of business, technology and regulation, has an international travel schedule that would make a global spy look like a homebody.
He recently returned from a conference in London.
In April, he was in India.
In March, he was in South Korea and Australia.
Last year, his passport saw stamps from Chile, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Belgium and China.
As one of the top 10 antitrust law professors in terms of scholarly citations in law reviews, he’s in high demand on the international circuit.
“Sometimes you need the human connection,” Sokol says. “You need to meet with alums and people in industry and in government and academia, and you can’t easily do that on Zoom or emails.”
A man in motion
In Mumbai this April, Sokol and other USC Gould leaders, including Dean Franita Tolson, signed a formal partnership with BITS Law School, one of India’s newest law schools.
“My brain is constantly in motion and I’m also constantly in motion,” says Sokol, the Carolyn Craig Franklin Chair in Law and a professor of law and business at USC Gould and USC Marshall School of Business.
One of the classes Sokol teaches in USC Marshall’s marketing department is “Beer, AI, and Video Games.”
Says Sokol: “Everyone thinks I’m going to serve beer, but I don’t. It’s all about different ways of thinking about digital transformation.”
A content creator
Sokol also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and handles a significant amount of administrative duties as faculty director of Gould’s Center for Transnational Law and Business and co-director of the USC Marshall Initiative on Digital Competition.
Oh, right: Sokol also hosts a global webinar series with the University of Cambridge and participates in international gatherings of legal scholars at USC Gould.
“I’m like everyone else in Los Angeles,” Sokol says. “I have a lot of content that I have to put together.”
For example, Sokol recently wrote an op-ed about the U.S. and Korea’s potential to cultivate innovation and expand through digital policy making.
He penned another article concerning the U.S. that touched on, among other issues, how AI is shaping legal rules and business outcomes.
Sokol is a leading expert on platform regulation, and his academic writing focuses on antitrust and platforms. This involves the thicket of rules and legal issues raised by online platforms such as social media, marketplaces and search engines. Such issues include content moderation, user data privacy, algorithmic bias and competition.
An energetic classroom
“I try to bring some of these global perspectives into my teaching,” says Sokol, who was born in Panama and holds citizenship there. Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, he’s a naturalized U.S. citizen who also speaks Spanish and Hebrew (he can read Portuguese).
“The wonderful thing is that the students here are from around the world and they’re bringing in experiences to class as well — my classroom has energy and intensity,” says Sokol, who earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 2001.
Sokol, who came to USC Gould in 2021 from the University of Florida Levin College of Law, graduated magna cum laude in history and political science from Amherst College in Massachusetts. He earned a Master of Studies in modern history from the University of Oxford and an LLM from the University of Wisconsin.
Downtime
In his limited spare time, Sokol cherishes spending time with his three daughters, ages 13 to 20.
They’ll take walks and sip coffee in Laguna Beach and listen to the sound of waves crashing.
Up in the air, Sokol will catch movies and just relax.
“Flying is my downtime when I also get to think a lot,” Sokol says.
Yup, his brain is always buzzing.
“I wake up every morning, and I’m truly thankful and grateful because I have amazing students and amazing colleagues,” Sokol says. “I get to sit and research and think.
“Every day is another day where there will be some thought will pop into my head and I can explore it. Something in the news will trigger some research idea or something that’s worth putting into teaching materials.
“I have the best job in the world.”
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