Asif Hussain

Who are you? Tell us about yourself?

I’m Asif. I’ve been a lawyer for 12 years now. I started in M & A and finance work, and I started doing tech work on the side at a law firm. My intro to tech was primarily through the field of FinTech, and I started getting into more tech-related work through that. I’ve been an in-house counsel at Citibank, and subsequently, for the last four years, I’ve been working for a tech startup in Dubai. 

What drew you to Georgetown’s LL.M. in Technology Law and Policy?

I wanted to get back into the academic and scholarship space. What I was experiencing as a council was the emergence of more technology that affected the way work was done. I wanted to apply myself in a different way where I felt I had aptitude and experience to maybe someday contribute to policy, and if not contribute, at least gain the tools to do policy work, to assist in developing regulatory frameworks, and have the intellectual curiosity supported by academic credibility. When I was researching LLM schools, Georgetown really ticked all those boxes. For me, it’s a place that will cultivate that experience.

You were named an A. Serwin Conference Scholar by the IAPP—congratulations!  Tell us what you enjoyed most about attending the 2025 Privacy. Security. Risk. Conference in San Diego.

It was an amazing forum for me as a student. We were running into people like Edward Kemp, who’s the head of the California Protection Authority, and seeing people from Apple, Microsoft, and Google. For lack of a better word, we could see the conscience of the tech sector accumulated in one space. There was so much conversation dedicated to exploring the nuances of these topics – how do you deal with cybersecurity issues? Are you considering process flows? If you’re a large conglomerate, do you have the governance frameworks to understand how these AI tools are processing your data? There was more than enough to keep someone like me engaged. I made very valuable professional connections there as well. 

You were also recently selected as a finalist for the Popper Prize! What did you write about and why did this topic interest you? 

It was a fictional scenario set in 2047 in a society where the entire body of law is grounded in Karl Popper’s philosophy about verification and falsifiability. The fact pattern of the competition problem was a decision before a refugee tribunal in this fictional society, where its entire philosophy and principles are scientific. What they proposed was that if a particular refugee who holds abhorrent views comes to their society, how would he integrate? Should they be able to give him refuge when the AI systems that rule that society would face a system crash if they tried to integrate this person? 

I drafted a dissent relying on real case law as well as the fictional case law they provided. My dissent was based on the fact that if a society is so secure in its methods of truth-finding, it shouldn’t be threatened by one man’s refusal or incompatibility with that system. My dissent just said that, despite how abhorrent his beliefs are, you’re persecuting him for beliefs because your AI systems can’t compute how to deal with them. They allowed you to create your own fictional case law, and they were a competition that allowed you to use AI in drafting, provided you gave them documented AI methodology. It was a very unique proposal – It was like world-building, a legal video game, effectively, that they allowed you to play with. 

You also participated in a Hackathon! Can you tell us about that? 

My teammate, Anne Wendenburg, who is also part of the tech law policy LLM, and I decided to participate in the Berkeley student initiative for AI safety. They had three tracks where you had to submit policy briefs on three different  AI issues. Anne and I decided to submit a policy brief for the export controls and microprocessor chip national security track. We were one of nine finalists out of 70-plus submissions they got for all tracks, so we were very happy! Again, it’s a whole different community of like-minded tech policy legal minds, who are grappling with the same sort of issues we are. For us, it’s a privilege to represent the Tech Law Policy Institute. 

What advice do you have for incoming LL.M. students that want to get involved with tech law opportunities outside of the classroom?

Aside from your professional objectives, you’ve probably come here to seek something that you wouldn’t get in a professional setting, like the Karl Popper competition. The opportunities that allow you to be more expressive are the ones that you should try to explore because they will really enrich your LLM experience. These are the fun things that enrich you, give you more tools, right? I’m in the society that hosted the Karl Popper competition, and now I’ve got a very strong professional relationship with them. That wouldn’t be something that I would get from just LinkedIn. 

Try to find like-minded people as a teammate, or someone you can really work with, and try to go for something like a hackathon or a submission that’s interesting. These are meaningful places where your ability actually shines through.